Jed Myers: “Pull of the Moon”
PULL OF THE MOON
I paddled where currents converged
from the sides of a narrow island.
The tide, coursing hard, rejoined
itself in a churn south of the spit
formed, I guessed, by centuries
of just such motion. Hordes of froth
collided. Schools of bright herring boiled
the surface—a mob of gulls bobbed,
hovered, dove, and stuffed their gullets
on those silvery swarms. The sizzle
drew in a few gleaming salmonid nomads
breaching ecstatic…. I was lost
in the thrall. There’d be no paddling
back to the beach till the slack,
so I drifted and turned like a twig
of cliff-side madrona blown from a shore,
tossed and soaked but safe enough
in the troughs of the chop. I remember
this when I think of us, what we call
our attraction—pull of the moon
on the one sea, its reunion, once
the land’s no longer between us.
Jed Myers’ poetry collections include Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), the chapbook The Nameless (Finishing Line Press), and the limited-edition handmade chapbook Between Dream and Flesh (Egress Studio Press). Among honors received are Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Literal Latte Poetry Award, New Southerner’s James Baker Hall Memorial Prize, and, in the UK, the McLellan Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Crab Creek Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken.