This week’s poem, Riley Mayes’ “in march I find solace,” offers a moment of transcendence in the shoulder season, through the beauties of the sea and its creatures. I love this poem’s visionary epiphanies and its exquisite sensitivity for music and imagery – a sky “lead and laden”; waves holding “a thin green that invites / the light and searches it.”

Mayes is a full-time student and writer living in Portland who is interested in explorations of nature and hyperlocal geography. Mayes’ work has been featured in several publications, including BUST Magazine, Garfield Lake Review, Havik Las Positas Journal of the Arts and Sudden Denouement Collective.

in march I find solace

in shells, the latent currency
that has since been pressed

and refined into rock.
a slow ceramic, the only thing that will hold

when I’m baying for the sun and
the sky is lead and laden.

the ocean keeps its memory
(when nothing else can)

in a thousand fractals
so bright as to blind

& waves, the thin green that invites
the light and searches it.

I’m feeling my way back along
the ridge of her spine

in the creature-scape, all the way
down to ghosts

of shells, shellacked, smoothed by sea.
I crave to keep that light inside me. instead

I’m crawling as close to the water
as I can, on a rock surrounded by

sea on all sides, and taste
love so deep as to drown.

— Riley Mayes

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “in march I find solace,” copyright 2023 by Riley Mayes, appears by permission of the author.

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