Brian O’Sullivan

Sea Glass Where the Tide Went Out

(After Lucille Clifton’s “Blessing the Boats”)

There’s that moment on Route Five on the way to the College, when you’re hit by the salty estuary air and the water blazes into sight and

dream river

we skip a breath and sometimes we think of how when we were moving here (and my memory blends this with the time before, when I made the movers move my desktop last so I could “keep on dissertating” even in a rough sea of boxes), we wrangled Nannie Miles and Flora into their cat carriers and we read Clifton over them, riding the tide … that is entering even now … the lip of our understanding. We were giggling and yet also making that St. Mary’s poem our prayer as we paddled into our lives here

               kayaks

—and now we drift among ghostly images of our mustard seed that never bloomed, and my mother breathing out her last memories into a muddled dusk, and a hawk in a hospice bed. So sometimes, when I think of time’s current, sometimes I don’t feel its kiss.  But then there is dreamy indigo sunset after sunset after sunset

                                             with you

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About the Author

Brian O’Sullivan is an associate professor of English and chair of LEAD seminars at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He has been published in Rattle, HOWL New Irish Writing, ONE ART, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for Chestnut Review.

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