Water, water, everywhere

I know that I've already posted Robert Lowell, but this is one of my absolute favorite poems of all time. I first read it about a year or so ago, and it eerily reminded me of a short story I had written a few years earlier. It is strange and wonderful to read a poem for the first time but feel that you already know it well. That's the power that this poem has over me.

Water

It was a Maine lobster town--
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,

and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,

and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.

Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.
From this dance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,

but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.

The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.

One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands.

We wished our two souls
might return like gulls
to the rock. In the end,
the water was too cold for us.