The Weeping of the Tides

After Edna St. Vincent Millay

In college I loved a poem
about missing a man.

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide.

There was no man.
There was no missing.
I was twenty, and whole,
and I would sit with that sonnet
and grieve no one at all —
and it felt like the truest thing I did all week.

I thought I loved the poem.
I think now the poem was teaching me
the shape of an ache
I hadn't earned yet.
A rehearsal.
Fitting for a sorrow
that hadn't been tailored.

For years I've quoted it to myself —
the weeping of tides —
and only recently learned
that's not the line.
The rain weeps. The tide shrinks.
I'd carried it so long
I'd smoothed it into something else.

Maybe that's what staying means.
Not preservation.
River-stone work.
What lodges in you
gets worn into your own shape —

until you can't tell anymore
where her words end
and your keeping begins.