Salt

by Joseph Fasano

Salt

         for PW

---

That night you woke alone

in your own arms, and left your note,

and walked down to the waters,

wasn’t it fall, or winter? Weren’t

the waves cold on your ankles,

as the hands are that have held you

in this one life? Weren’t the seagulls

screaming, your hair blowing back toward

the mountains? Weren’t you riddled

with ghosts?



Listen. I am talking to you now,

wholly. That night you swam alone

into the ocean,

didn’t you mean to stay there, didn’t you want

to become the waves, didn’t

you ask the waves to take you, and

didn’t they refuse, sweet dreamer, didn’t they carry you

as no one could, didn’t they leave you

on the harbor, your hair

like a net for your keeping, a dream, a story,

a power, didn’t you lie there

for hours, and the wind

still lifting your nightclothes,

and the gulls still diving around you,

and the sea still stroking your ankles

like a love who knows it's best to let you go?

---

Joseph Fasano’s writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is celebrated around the world for what Ilya Kaminsky has called its “lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments.” Fasano’s many books of poetry and prose include The Teacher (2025), The Last Song of the World (2024), The Swallows of Lunetto (2022), Vincent (2015), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His poetry prompts, collected in The Magic Words (2024), have helped people of all ages unlock their creativity. His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American Poet.” Fasano holds degrees in philosophy and poetry from Harvard University and Columbia University, and he is the Founder of Fasano Academy, “an initiative aimed at integrating the whole human being in an increasingly fractured world.”