The shore

And when I was nearing the ocean, for the first
time since we'd parted -
approaching that place where the liquid stillborn
robe pulls along pulverised boulder -
that month, each year, came back when we'd swim,
first thing, then go back to bed, the the kelp-field, our
green hair pouring into each other's green
hair of skull and crux bone. We were like
a shore, I thought - two elements touching
each other, dozing in the faith that we were
knowing each other, one of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousnesss,
magnetic in reticent mourning. His first
mate was a husky pup, who died,
from the smoke, in a fire. Someone asked him,
once, to think from the point of view
of the flames, and his face relaxed, and he said,
Delicious. I hope he can come to think
of me like that. The weeks before he left,
I'd lie on him, as if not heavy,
for a minute, after the last ferocious
ends of the world, as if loneliness had come
overland to its foreshore, breaker,
shelf, trench, and then had fallen down to where
it seemed it could not be recovered from. Elements,
protect him, and those we love, wether we both
love them or not. Physics, author of our
death, stand by us. Compass, we are sinking
down through sea-purse toward eyes on stalks.
We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive. Doing it -
it - with him, I felt I shared
a dignity, an inhuman sweetness
of his sisters and brothers the iceberg calf,
the snow ant, the lighthouse rook,
the albatross, who once it breaks out of the
shell, and rises, does not set down again.

Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap, Cape Poetry, 2012.