Needing the water
but far from the ocean,
I take myself to the river closest to me,
the same one that turns into a lake
by the house where I grew up,
then is strained through the teeth
of a great dam and released to flow
40 miles to the city where I now live.

I can’t explain why some days
I need to see water and motion
on its way to the sea that I am missing.
Call it longing, call it grief,
call it a settling.

But when I find my way to the riverpath,
walking and stopping to take pictures
of new purple vetch in high season,
its florets hanging like ringlets
off a young girl’s head,

I am startled by a splash and the arf!
of one of the resident sea lions.
His massive head emerges, a fish
in his jaws, which he flings across the water
in a pinniped game of fetch,
then dives after it.

I am completely taken out of myself,
caught up in the marvel, in the interplay
of life and death before me—
perhaps of actual play, too—
of being just one organism
in a great ocean or a swift river,
whether walking or swimming
or flying or crawling,

as all of us making our way
through this world
somehow manage to do.

•••

You can watch the sea lion I saw toss his fish here.