In a bunk below the waterline, in darkness
tidal shift against the boat becomes ham-handed men
in heavy coats pacing through standing water
speaking to no one. It is not for me they wade

through water and through night and drift away again.
Only memory perseveres through rain. My father will not come. Will not
be standing on the dock when I step off at morning light. Really
I am almost old: there isn't any news.

I have held onto marriages made of will, worn thin
between stones and whirlpools. I dream my children
much younger, in wailing flight under swollen skies,
empty road ahead. It is not strange to me

that we are so largely made of water. So much
falls from our grasp, first floats then fails, dissolves
and drowns. It takes an admiral to overlook
all that is lost in the deep. I am a watery woman

who once almost drowned. Without floatation, a cold ocean,
an outgoing tide, a two-foot chop. I am uneasy alive. A quart richer
in fear, a gallon heavier. Success is a bird that chooses a shoulder to ride on,
which shoulder stiffens under the random flex of sea-stinking talons. My father

will be long dead now. I could never find him. As in a dream,
sea-benumbed and weighted legs will not carry me from harm;
nor toward it, despite ungovernable desire.

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a fourth generation Californian, l.a. seidensticker is as much of a hermit as she can afford to be. She and her husband have been dividing their time between a recently acquired small cabin in Montana wilderness and their Sonoma County veterinary practice...

so far this has inspired more fatigue than poetry. on the other hand, the veterinary clinic is very busy and often noisy; the northwest corner of Montana is neither.
 

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autumn 2006 | kaleidowhirl