Powers of the Sea

I have only once felt the full, soft power of the ocean.

Not its rage of storm or the fury of its gale, 

or its unending slow eroding of wood and metal, 

or even the doomed battle of islands to stay above water,

but the enormous blunt instrument that hit me behind the knees

one blissfully sunny day in the Caribbean, suddenly 

removing all my gravity, turning me topsy-turvy, cutting off

recourse to all I knew of geometry and topography;

my face buried in spray, my feet utterly misplaced

and my mind suffused with wets and blues, barely keeping

a grip on whatever there was that was not the undertow;

implacable, silent, monstrous, stronger than man or beast;

more gentle, more loving,  more caressing than a mother’s hands,

another blind face of the widow-maker, the giant at the window,

incomprehensible, not to be bargained with, more than

a mere matter of life and death, an encounter with a reality 

so profound, so unstoppable that I remember thinking - if

thinking is even the right word - that now it is time to go,

there is no further welcome here in a place where forces

alien to control live and move and have their being.