I now know much, my love,

Your hands still strong but less safe in my mind.

Your steel gray gaze always focused on the distance

I now know much my love, and yet

My reality remains undefined but soon explored.

Often you left to roam so great an unknown as me.

Your strong, rough hands upon my hair,

Your gray-eyed gaze focused on my face

Often you left me to make

Known the unknown and me a lesser certainty.

Weeping and lonely through

Childbirth and longing you left me and us.

Your hand upon the great wooden wheel

Your feet firmly planted on waves of fresh water steel,

I know you, my love, along with storm and churning sea.

I know your love for what is vast and not tamable;

Ice in September, shipwreck in November.

Buffeted by howling wind, your back straighter

Only I am frailer; My ghost upon the shore

Longing for more now than you and your steel water gaze.

Now sit upon your chair, solid on rocky shores,

Sand in your shoes, the wind softly upon your neck and chin.

Make the mistake of me safe within my grave

Smile a thin satisfied line.

My love, look upon who I am and do not recognize

Your ghost, your Steel Water

In heavy heated August I freeze the blood of men.

As flesh and blood I was a wisp of mist

At death a ghost without a properly mourned grave,

As a crashing wave, now your proper lover.

Come one last time, challenge the ‘she,’

In the vast freshwater sea.

Come one last time to steel ice, steel wind

to clarify that I am the reality of what men love best,

that which drowns and screams down their death.