A poem for Wednesday

Four days of beauty and indulgence, walking everywhere instead of riding the bus or subway, eating in parks and stopping to smell all the roses. You think I'd be sated from it all. But I lay in bed last night thinking I could handle more and dreaming about what else I could do and where I could go.

And then I thought how soon it will be August and I'll be near the sea again and I got up to read this. I wondered, in my half-dream state, if I love my material world too much to give it all up live beneath in the sea. And I didn't know the answer. There's a lot to be said for both really. This is by Mary Oliver.

The Sea
Stroke by
   stroke my
      body remembers that life and cries for
         the lost parts of itself—
fin gills
   opening like flowers into
      the flesh—my legs
         want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
   just what the blue-gray scales
      shingling
         the rest of me would
feel like!
   paradise! Sprawled
      in that motherlap,
         in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
   what a spillage
      of nostalgia pleads
         from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
   inland, the brittle
      beauty of understanding
         and dive,
and simply
   become again a flaming body
      of blond feeling
         sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea's body
   vanished
      like victory inside that
         insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
   perfect
      beginning and
         conclusion of our own.