Why You Love the Ocean

I didn’t know I had you in me then.
Christmas morning. The still Kona Bay opened
and took me in, finned, slick as angelfish,
the ribboning black and white bodies.
I’d tried before. Seasick. Licked in the waves.
Cut on black lava-rock stucco.
I didn’t know the secret of the swim:
yielding to a current, being pulled into
a school, gilled, breathing as the sea breathes.
Did you sense then, suspended in water
within water, a cetaceous world beyond?
The open ocean, spinner dolphins
scalloping the surface, humpbacks calving,
the eastward drift of leis laid in the tide for your return.