this is how I love you gazing
at the creation of your making
filled with water and light
the way you hover like a dragonfly
over lead white and rabbit skin glue
moiled sand and spume
the waves piling up from before
your birth that carry you now
in an artist’s boat like Hokusai’s
great wave at Kanagawa
this is how I know you
by turpentine and the golden mean
the brocade that shimmers
like fish scales you’ve scattered
across the sea and the tiny
figures swimming for their lives
who manned the lifeboats in your chest
set adrift in the slipping tide
this is how you marry dream to vision
with oars that cleave the fabric of time
backlit by the sweep of your brush
how you ride the crests like flying fish
at dusk how you hold the sacredness
for this ocean as you do for me
stitching color to canvas meticulously
‘till all the hues are gathered
even as the breaker spends itself
like some great whale on the shore
trailing its luminescent wake
in the silence of the deep water
