Sweeter Air Poem by Patti Masterman

Give me the sweeter air of his breath,
The smoother wave of his voice;
Voice I've never heard, where freedom
Would sing in plunging starfish octaves,
And rhythmed oceans floating in syncopated bliss,
His eyes of seaweed like a glass-bottomed boat,
Upon the foaming sea of me,
Transparent to the marrow'd depth of my bones
Below his arc of circling nights and days.

And the gulls crying, and the west wind answering
The vagrant tides; a dead pirate's buried cache of shells;
And the mysterious treasures of a single mermaid,
Who once cut legs into her own sloping tail,
Trying to follow him out of the whirlpool.