Untitled (Howe) Poem by Ryan Van Winkle

"I think the sea is a useless teacher"
Marie Howe, From Nowhere


How I
looked towards
your eyes as if they
were nothing but waves
and all I learned from the sea
is that it took the sand and never
spoke what it wanted and when we
needed cool it was cool and when we
needed hot it was only a radio signal from
over the sound, coming in weak from Long
Island and when you needed hot you looked in-
to my eyes and said, Love, your name is darkness
and I said, that is not my name, that is the name of my
teacher, the sea, or a fisherman wishing into waves all night
with his wife keeping the light on then off and all he or I ever
got from the sea was a vocabulary which, like sand, fades and fades.