Poem of the Week, by Todd Boss

These days I spend a fair amount of time walking the beach and watching surfers. I don’t know how they do it, how they paddle out there and then hang out, waiting and watching for oncoming waves that are big enough to skim underneath, along, in front of. I don’t know they can see that wave coming and not want to duck right under it or paddle frantically back to the shore, the way I would do because big waves terrify me. The black-wetsuited surfers are maybe like the whales in this poem below, fearless without thinking about fear, because water is their home. A world without hem.

Whales Wear the Patterns of the Surface of the Water

– Todd Boss

all over their bodies whenever they rise for breath,

forever slipping in and out of sheaths of silk and sheer,

the sun’s hookless fishnets gliding over and over them,

over and over again. The surface is their coutourière,

and her daring glitz and glamour is what all the girls are

wearing this summer. How beautiful they are in their azure

negligees, their silver-spangled zigzag rags aglimmer!

Later, when the day’s bead curtains shift away and they drift

into the dreamless deep, they’ll leave their lovely lingerie

behind and find themselves unashamed between seamless

sheets of black satin—a world without hem—where nothing,

not even the moon’s thin strings of pretty under-things,

can come between their lovers and them.

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