To the Air
His fisherman’s cap
is gray as is the sea
where he stares. He once
saw a mermaid
there near
the shore tangled
in kelp. She wanted him
to not see her. She wasn’t
a gift. He wasn’t. Yet
he stared. Keeps returning
to stare at the now
nothing he sees. Nothing
as in not her.
He once said he loved
her sea life.
He’s captured capturer.
Blame agony.
Blame perpetual
return to the kelp
stuck to his feet for
the wind over
ears in canals.
She’s singing
a water hymn
not to him
but to the air.
This is where
he dissolves.
Copyright © 2024 by Myronn Hardy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 23, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is thinking through the notion of loneliness, its capaciousness. On several morning runs along the Atlantic, I’d often notice an old man, always in the same spot on the beach, staring vacuously at the sea. And I imagined he was there lonely and longing for a sea-being who’d saved or refused to save him from a deep absence, a grayness around and within him.”
—Myronn Hardy
Myronn Hardy
