San Francisco Bay

For nine years I swam in this bay,
nearly every day, all hours, all weather,
from Alcatraz, across the Golden Gate
diving off Fort Mason—always
I came out changed, sat in Ghirardelli’s
overlooking where I swam
drinking a cappuccino on the outside deck,
blissful, but sobered by sorrowful calm.
 

I consult, almost scry, this surface—
facets reflecting overcast sky—
I know it so well
how cold it is, how it tastes
less salty after spring rains
how it carried me on swims, lifted me,
forced me to fight currents
nudged me with the edge of its tide.
 

And all the while my swimming was really
an imagined conversation with my father,
who swam in this ocean as a young man,
and with whom I rarely talked
during that period, without arguing.
What appalls me now, being
so much alike, is that things we couldn’t say
to each other were heard only by the sea.