Gyre

I did have stepsons. No, I should say I do.
And I did look for them, but I should say I didn’t
find them. No one found them. I should say that

my stepsons were not found, unless you count
those few bones, that tattered shirt, the Levi’s that lasted
all those months in the kelp. And did you know

that kelp beds—the kind that are impossible
to propel your kayak over, or through, the kind
that make a carpet on the sea, one that makes you believe

you can walk on water—did you know
that those kelp beds are keepers? Whole collections:
white Styrofoam dots; water, half-drunk, in plastic

bottles with blue labels and blue lids; sleeping sea otters,
sometimes more than one; half-shells of mussels, floating
like blue Venetian gondolas

in circular canals with no exits; tiny minnows that leap
for no reason and land, not in water, but on blades of kelp,
some ridged, some smooth, all of them

growing before your sunlit eyes, while the minnows
in their silver straitjackets jerk and gasp. Deeps and shallows.
These bones once danced the deer dance

played at stepping through water
with exaggerated slowness: (Blue heron.
O great one! Your disapproving side-eye.)

Catch-me-if-you-can: a cormorant diving,
flash of dark motion. Not a hand waving. Paddle further.
Crab float, orange and black. Not a life jacket.

Eyes becoming tunnels. Arms becoming wood. Legs becoming
sea through the hull of my kayak. Slippery boys becoming fish,
becoming deer, becoming clouds.

Every time I look they are somewhere else
and me? the last to spot them. I dredge pop-eyed dreams,
distended song bladders. And I should say that nothing

is the past. I should say that I search circular canals with no exits
knowing I do have stepsons. I do. Nothing is the past.
They are there in my ribcage. Knocking.