Thetis--Aldrin Valdez

for Mai Maguire

I met you in a city by the sea,
just yesterday
it seems. Your prettiness was harsh
at first, unusual
because most girls then
were blonde and stout--
you were lithe and ocean-eyed,
not in color but in gaze.

I heard you sing once, too,
in a bus to the mountains.
It was winter and your nautical tune
warmed the ride through valley frosts.

And then you became a friend
years later, in the flotsam-jetsam of hurricane times.
I ended up beside you in class sifting too slowly
through millennia of art, pausing to consider
a then-faint metaphor
in the Cycladic shores of Grecian yore.

Since then, you've become too quick.
You move too fast and too much,
I can barely keep a memory still;
it ripples with a mere touch
and then I remember I cannot breathe water.

I would like one day
to grasp you completely, secure you
in the tangle of my arms,
finally tangible and exhausted of all forms
except one:

My friend
my sister.

Aldrin Valdez is a Sophomore Painting Major.
avaldez@pratt.edu