Floating Poem by Michael Burch

Floating
by Michael R. Burch

Memories flood the sand's unfolding scroll;
they pour in with the long, cursive tides of night.

Memories of revenant blue eyes and wild lips
moist and frantic against my own.

Memories of ghostly white limbs...
of soft sighs
heard once again in the surf's strangled moans.

We meet in the scarred, fissured caves of old dreams,
green waves of algae billowing about you,
becoming your hair.

Suspended there,
where pale sunset discolors the sea,
I see all that you are
and all that you have become to me.

Your love is a sea,
and I am its trawler—
harbored in dreams,
I ride out night's storms;
unanchored, I drift through the hours before morning,
dreaming the solace of your warm breasts,
pondering your riddles, savoring the feel
of the explosions of your hot, saline breath.

And I rise sometimes
from the tropical darkness
to gaze once again out over the sea...
You watch in the moonlight
that brushes the water;

bright waves throw back your reflection at me.


This is a poem I wrote as a teenager. It has been published by Penny Dreadful, Romantics Quarterly, Boston Poetry Magazine and Poetry Life & Times. The poem's mermaid has aspects of a ghost, phantom and mirage.The mermaid was inspired by ancient myths of Circe, Calypso, Medusa, Atargatis, Ea, Derketo, Thessalonike, Li Ban, Melusine and of the Sirens, Lorelei, Dryads, Nymphs, Sprites, Sylphs, Naiads, Nereides, Nix, Rusalkas, Ceasg and Selkies.