From this shore, I see your shadowy form.

A boy belly-down, bouncing and buoyed

by a father’s open palm. Your light limbs

flapping like a chick that cannot leave

a watery ground. Part lesson, part baptism,

the universe leans in to capture the sound

of something dying, something being born.

Legs and arms motoring, hands and feet

flailing to master the strokes—too fast.

As if to answer a father’s ask: A legion

of pelicans, mere inches from the ocean’s

surface glass, soar past—wings sculpted,

hovering—forgetful of the largeness of it all,

forgetful of the need to flap. In this half-

light, I trace a silhouette. A child’s beginner-

breaths feathering a mother’s neck.

Her cradle song your cadence, breath

meeting breath, notes on a musical staff.

                                   ***

Or perhaps there were no pelicans, no open

palm, no watery weightlessness, no cradle song.

Perhaps all you heard this term was an oracle’s

litany of wrongs—riddles and miseries dealt

like a hand of cards to a blameless throng.

A procession of innocents who simply longed

for answers. Paris’s Helen, Croesus’s sunken

home; or an infant abandoned, ankles pierced.

Incest. Infanticide. So dark, so sickening

a storyline the immortals designed, what else

could our hero do but make himself blind?

Champion of the gods. Medalist against the odds.

                                   ***

How should we answer the charge to live,

to find our course? I greeted you at a threshold,

green, Arcadian—placed a wager, not on neat

lessons to be learned, not on a final score—

but on the promise of journey, labyrinths.

Paths that would open passages to familiar

yet unfamiliar tours. Orpheus, untrusting,

looking back. Euridice buried, an avalanche

of what they could have had. Gilgamesh

dressed down: The gods gifting him a friend

to love—and lose. To yearn for friendship

more than the gilded crown. Paths like

accesses to enduring lives. Narratives like

summonings to your wandering minds.

Each gathering, each scheduled class

perhaps like this, the last—closure

without arrival, a letter sealed. Let time

loosen the wax, an older, hardened peel.

This is, and has been, all along,

your exercise at sea, your cradle song.