But Did You Ever Feel

For Lucy

But did you ever feel
more like a species
Of happiness, an inhabitant of tides, an oystercatcher among oysters,
Than you did late that day standing in the undertow,
lifting your small daughter high—
                                                                              her cries an ekphrastic kind of weather

 
Pealing all the way out and all the way back—flying her high over sun-drunk waves
that came like laughter and would not stop?
And no two syllables of that rising tide connoted anything like the same sea
Twice, each wave a child of the moment’s mind, each swelling
a telling your whole life—and of the child’s life—
                                                                                                     a joke at time’s unceasing expense.