TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I didn’t get to the ocean this summer, but sometimes I can take a deep breath and travel there in my imagination. I can hear the sound of the waves. I can see the pelicans flying in formation overhead, then diving for fish. I can smell the salt air. I can feel the wet sand beneath my feet as I walk the beach, collecting shells that catch my eye. 

I love the ocean for how small it makes me feel. I don’t mean small in a negative way, a way that suggests insignificance. No, standing on the beach, looking out at the expanse of blue that extends farther than I can see, I feel small in the best way. I’m reminded that I’m part of a whole. And that this landscape existed before me and will exist after me. I feel grateful to be alive to witness it. 

Sometimes I wonder: Am I especially in love with the ocean because I live in the middle of Ohio? If I lived on a coast, would I be as mesmerized? I think—and hope—I would be. I think my job, as a poet and as a human being, is to always lean toward wonder.

Today’s poem offers us images we often find in poetry: the ocean, the moon, dreams, a mother, a wound. But it offers us these elements in such a profoundly original and moving way. I couldn’t read this poem just once—I had to read it several times, picking up new treasures with each reading, like walking along the same stretch of beach at different times of day and finding new shells.

Notes on Beachgrass
by Yong-Yu Huang

Again, my mother calls about the dream 
where I strip wild lilies from the beach.
Greenery wandering in muted tones, the thin decay
of beauty I learned in my mind’s eye.
In the distance, an animal’s fattened belly
tips into salt. The sleeping dog, the tired barking
of gulls. Don’t I know this dullness?
These days, I’d love anything buoyant.
A sign by the rocks says Removal of Wildlife Prohibited
and I scrape a knee in passing. The ragged line,
my welling heart. Above, the moon devouring
the shoreline, its face winter-snapped and gibbous.
It is always hungry, this evidence for gravity. 
I feel heavier than I should, bloated. 
Why are we always looking for water
outside our bodies? I want the tide
to move faster. I want it to fade 
in the evening’s dragging breath,
like the recoil of energy, wound tight
enough to trap foam in the small eyes of sand.
My last night in the dunes, I practiced meditating
with my face tilted towards the rich, leaving light.
How my mother bought a dowsing rod
to find me, sprawled out and kissed
with horseflies. Have you ever seen heaven?  I asked.
From where, with whom?  I pulled her down next to me.
Above, a bracket of birds heading south.
The errant dog washed out to sea.
I wept at the sound—like the mark 
on my knee scabbing over, quietly.

"Notes on Beachgrass" by Yong-Yu Huang. Used by permission of the poet.