Rebecca Lee Clay
How to Write a Poem about the Ocean
Note the debris on the beach. Be specific. Crumpled Popeyes bag, ripped RIP CURL flip- flop, blackened remains of a bonfire, plastic Fireball pint, empty.
Smell is important. Do not use words like briny or brackish. Say it smells of phlegm, or a margarita rim.
Devote entire stanzas to decomposition. The bundles of seaweed, the flies hovering above. Do not describe the flies as clouds. Say they look like letters on a page, or a plague. If there are decomposing seals your poem is in luck. Decomposing seals, and their vultures, make excellent metaphors.
We already know the waves are white horses.
We already know the sunset is an open mouth.
Boats or buoys are good to include in your poem. They are especially good if the buoy looks like a person stuck out at sea, face to the horizon, eyes unclosable, cursed to watch the sun rise and set and rise and set till the sun bursts into a red giantess and the buoy is blinded, or better yet incinerated. Rickety fishing boats passing in front of the sun as it sets are good too. A bit cliché for your poem but a very nice thing to watch.
Tsunamis are too obvious a metaphor for your poem but the moments before, when the tide is sucking out fast and the winking mole crabs are rolling breathless behind it, are good.
If you have dunes behind your ocean you might want to climb one. Become eye level with a kite, have a face-off there in the atmosphere you will inevitably lose because though you can gain elevation you are stuck to the sand. The kite may ask you to cut its string. You can decide how to respond.
Let gravity run you down the dune but watch out for broken bottles. Dunes are also good places to drink.
Find a rock, or a shell. Put it in the pocket of your hoodie and run your thumb across it. Poems like smoothness, and repetition.
Be careful if you live near an ocean. You may stop writing poems about anything else. Your ocean poems may take up entire notebooks even though the smell and the seal flesh and the flies and the cursed buoy make you nauseous and it hasn’t been sunny since September.
Also, you are not fishing or swimming or building sand castles, and you’d rather be in the woods. So then?
Birds are good to include in your poem. Especially the tiny black ones that stand in bird herds at the water’s edge, skittering away on matchstick legs as the tide reaches for them. Sky birds are good too, especially if they are overhead at sunset, pulling the night behind them, forcing the second hand down with each wing beat. You need them because the ocean doesn’t have wings to whip at time, and neither do you.
We already know the water is god’s belly.
We already know the sunrise is the sky spreading its legs.
The horizon might be a very useful device for your poem. It could be your fear, or your emptiness, or your hope. It is where the Last Ship is first spotted, a spouting gray whale, a pod of pink dolphins, a warship, a message in a bottle, a single lake-sized sail made of butterfly wings, your savior, thunderheads, a lifeboat. Anything could come over that line of light.
Maybe you’ll spot some otters in the water and you can put them in your poem. Or maybe leave them out. They look happy; they don’t belong here. In your poem that is. In the ocean they couldn’t belong more.
Maybe the otter, when it pokes its head out of the sea and looks to land, can write a poem about choking and slowness.
You are here (again) because you are the buoy. Neck aching and corneas scarred.
Anything could come over that line of light.
And you wouldn’t want to miss the raft of plastic bottles, tied together with fraying string. Him on top, burnt and thirsty and wanting (you).
But his compass fell between the bottles and he wound up in Santa Rosalita instead, drinking palomas, in (another) love.
No matter, there are island prisons (falling out of favor and surely accepting applications) where they shoot on site if you’re spotted making for the beach.
Maybe in your poem you could make yourself into an otter. If you’re an otter you can simply fluff your fur and not feel the cold. If you’re an otter the reason you scan for a male is because your face is a web of pink scars and you have your pup to protect now. You hope he never comes (back). And wouldn’t that be nice to feel, in your poem?
And then one day you are at the beach and there is no trash and no dead seals and the sky is blue and it is perfect, there could not be anything more perfect, you cannot stop looking at the water as it laps at the sand, its wide tongue circling in easy caresses, light on water, gold on water, your feet are bare and you run, maybe even laugh as the water comes up, takes your ankles. You do not think to look at the horizon. You write a very beautiful and very boring poem.
But the day always ends and the sun always sets and then you have to (look at the horizon) – it is everywhere, a mess of sudden color. You all look, you and the long line of beachgoers, families and dogs and couples and crabs. You could leave while the sun is still high in the sky, barricade yourself in your apartment, close the windows, watch tv.
But you would just create horizons out of the buffering line on Netflix, out of tea leaves, out of the broken blinds mocking you with their gap-toothed grimace.
The next day you’ll be back at the ocean anyway.
You should know by now that your poem isn’t an ocean otherwise you would be an otter pup swimming through it, diving through the words and sunbathing on your mother’s floating belly, tucking your favorite rock into your otter pocket, stroking it. But you are land-stranded, a metal detector in one hand, a bent kite in the other, scratched binoculars around your neck. A bucket at your feet. Two empty pints of Fireball. Your tight-lunged bipedal body and this stupid heart clanging at your ribs, clanging at the page
wind-beaten and waiting.
Rebecca Lee Clay lives in Asheville, NC with her dogs and partner and works as a mental health nurse. She is an alumnus of the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and received an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition.