As a child the closest I came to "the ocean" was more often Lake Superior, a huge, freshwater lake leftover from the last Ice Age. To small eyes, it was how an ocean was supposed to look by simple definition: no land on the horizon. The small city of Duluth, Minnesota, a place I visited frequently with my family, remains the furthest inland port in the U.S., its large iron ore ships floating between the locks and canals of the Great Lakes all the way to Quebec City. I remember placing my hands in the water and thinking about how the water I touched would eventually touch the ocean, and by way of this motion, we were connected.
When I read back over these poems, I feel a melancholy swimming inside them, at both times floating and quickly moving. They might be the leftover sounds or pieces of light from a dream that want to escape the room. The room is a farmhouse—maybe that of my grandparents in Northeastern Iowa—surrounded by a field of snow that has frozen into a kind of paralyzed inland sea. For most of my life I have felt as if I was looking out the window of this house, the "real" sea a place of longing I constructed in my mind, a kind of coping mechanism, a faraway heaven. I like to think we each have an interior sea within us, the place we go to when the present feels like too much.
My friend the poet Eric Baus once described making poems as building "a second kind of body" when in pain (or I think of any intense sensation, a mark of being alive at all). These poems in particular feel like a series of cocoons I lived inside for a very long time, each one its own, singular universe. I love the Buddhist cosmology of the possibility of heaven and hell realms existing simultaneously, and that there are also entire worlds blooming and dying within each second. It seems accurate that a winter field then, for example, could be both a heaven and hell realm in the same instant on earth, and that a poem can also function this way.
