Owen Beach Aubade - a new Tacoma poem

Owen Beach Aubade


Much like the greatest sea treasures
we set out to comb, you arrive to me
broken. Like an old green wine bottle
that no longer remembers what filled it before
or how its vintage was spoken, it chooses now
to be repurposed. To be tossed in tide violence.
To be knocked silly by indifference. To be left. Alone.
Then, woken up polished as a trinket. Divined
amidst wet rockweed and foul wrack
and renamed mine and fit to my hand.
It is much like love at our middle age,
how the turned out jellyfish does not amaze us
because it was once beautiful or swam. We recognize it
now because it stings. Because high tide pulled out
hours ago, and there it shines. Quite alive and bubbling
on the pebbled beach, that moony clear bell still continues
to beat, plump and smooth as a young heart
braving this brackish shore.