Devotion

when it blunders into the boardwalk, the second-
rate jellyfish, we are not sorry for it, watch amused

as it bumps and bumps the piling, finally getting
the angle right for escape, a vagrant pulsing against

the tide, blurring toward the atlantic, purples subdued
to brown under gathering grey. the cormorants

don’t notice or boredom sets in: they have seen it
a hundred times, know no reward comes from a morsel

of rubbery flesh. somewhere in this salt marsh, tide
runneling dark water, is a salt marsh sparrow, easily

confused with the Nelson’s or the seaside, look close
for the less buffy chest, the strong markings—white

stripes down the back. seeing means letting
the day turn away time, splitting with patience

the spartina from the sparrow, adjusting the eyes
to capture the rustle that turns to one, two, three

possible specimens, lifting off towards another swale
backs to us as if offering binoculars the perfect

perspective for accurate ID. our fantasy. we know
they don’t care, their devotion only to each other, to

the insects and spiders of these muddy flats, to the tiny
spineless marine creatures, the merging of inlet with sea,

how each pulls and pushes the other every single day,
a borderless survival never stopping, not stopping ever.

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Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.