The Ocean With Me

“The Ocean with Me” is one of my favorite poems. It is about growing up on the Oregon Coast, leaving home and travelling, and eventually returning. It is also about the experience of crossing between cultures. It is a comment on fact that, while your past and your home can never really be left behind, you also can never really go home once you leave. A bit of a conundrum! Our AI program (Suno) is rather unpredictable, but this time it came remarkably close to producing the music and phrasing I had in mind. (My lyrics and Carol’s video and production) Lyrics: The Ocean With Me I grew up at the end of land With the endless rocking of the seas And long winds sighing all day long Playing in the high fir trees. And when I left home I took the ocean with me, And I dreamed in the widening distance home Slept cradled in the sea’s long sound and breathed New stars, dry air, and walked old stone. And I learned the rudiments of silence With long swells running in my heart, alone I kept the ocean with me, far away from home And no one knew my language, the words for “love” or “free” And no seemed to share the running, long swells of the sea. They held me in the desert, In the hollow of their hush And I wake to their widening distances That take me with a rush. And when I left for home, I was leaving home again And I took distance and the ocean with me, The windswept whispering of sand The long hushed swells of restless seas. Now I’m drowning in the distance, My words like bubbles rise From a swimmer’s final breath And astonished, silenced eyes. And they rise and break and stretch away On the gentle, smooth, long running sea And sound can reach the land no more, And no one waits upon that shore. But this distance isn’t longing, It’s the air that I’m now breathing I’ve no longing now to close that distance It’s an opening now, and not a leaving. And I’ve no remaining urge, To waste new breath on words Can the tongue shape distance into speech Can such a kind of speech be heard? I take the ocean when I go Back in the distances I know Free in the long swells of that sea Home in the distances that open me Home in the distances I own alone.