Reyzl Grace
​

Zaliv Vozvratseniya

The highest tidal bore in the United States
occurs in the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet.

Reaching heights of twelve metres and more,
it is a significant tourist attraction and water hazard.

As the student watches through a pair of coin-op binoculars
at a Seward Highway pull-out, the latter is the focus.

The student is used to this—is taught to fear many things:
the tide, the Russians, any angel from heaven

who would preach any other gospel than the one
received at a mother’s knee and a father’s hand,

every drowning pull that draws away
from the coast of this body to an unnamed shore.

Through binoculars, though, the bore tide appears
as a silent and wondrous thing, turning over

and over itself until it is become wholly
its own creation—a rustle of shifting feathers

that emerges into the grace of that first forward sweep
of wing as a swan frees itself from the ice.

This is not what the student—a poor swimmer—is meant
to take away, but as any folklorist or sex
​
educator knows, even the sternest warnings
rarely survive contact with something beautiful.
The Poet Drunkenly Remonstrates with High Tide

You have a way of holding everything in slender grace, like a line of Sappho.
You touch my arm, my hair, but not my [ . . . ], trace me fractured like a line of Sappho.

It hurts to be missed by one whose eyes [ . . . ] every sister of the Pleiades.
In your study, every book lies open to you; one is me, and nine are Sappho.

I stagger around this island like the deck of a ship; I know how it must look.
But I am not drunk. I do not slosh [ . . . ]. I’m just pouring out some wine for Sappho.

For all you’ve taught me, my hair is still weighed down with scorching stars—the charcoal halo
of a student who cannot [ . . . ] your likeness, nor turn a verse as fine as Sappho.

Another pupil lies upon your couch, whose forms are more pleasing. What can I say?
What gift of tongue could light on me while all the [ . . . ] muses sit and pine for Sappho?
​
One day, time will lap away the long, sighing ἁ​ of our moon, and you will leave me
incomplete [ . . . ] a salt-drenched rose that, in some old dialect, once rhymed with Sappho.
--
Reyzl Grace is a poet, translator, short story writer, and post-Soviet lesbian Jew from Alaska. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, named a finalist for the Jewish Women’s Poetry Prize and Best Literary Translations, and featured in Room, Rust & Moth, The Times of Israel, and elsewhere. By day, she is a public librarian in Minneapolis—by night, a poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and Cordella.