VINYL POETRY

Volume 4, October 2011

BIRDIE
Keetje KuipersView Contributor’s Note

What I Thought Then

Let me build it for you: the sand with its forgotten patterns,
the tidal pools holy as the empty recital hall is holy, the ocean

and its deep and caustic search for a coast that won’t erode.
How good to feel so small, to lean my back against the rotten

transom of your boat and hope that it might give way
beneath my weight, plunge me into the sea to float among

the contraband of crab shells and Styrofoam. I could pretend
I was your only one, even as your hesitance unspelled me, even

as I became nothing more than a gunmetal sheen, a tick
in the wheat field of water. That’s the great luxury of enough:

thinking salt water will suffice against thirst. But I have
the rest of my life to be fucked in the dark. Whether you

loved me or not—if you even knew how—the tide didn’t
frighten me. You were the waves I couldn’t turn my back on.