The sea, the sea, the sea

Someone’s retirement home is named Thalassa.
I keep a tight grip on the buggy: here
the road arcs steeply down towards the beachfront.
The sea is down there, doing its thing as always,
a doing that is closest of all to being,
a being that undulates into undoing.
I don’t go in the sea. It’s cold and wet
and I am warm and dry and wish to stay so.
I sit next to the buggy on a mat.
The children run full pelt towards the sea
as if they had come from it, were reverting
to it as from orbit, speeding hotly
across the sand into their element.
Splashdown! I used to dream of outer space;
of going there and never coming back,
the night’s great ocean swallowing me up.
But now I think I couldn’t be apart
indefinitely from the blue-green sea,
its give-and-take, its alien marine life
that hardly cares to be like us at all.
Offshore a wind farm twirls, a distant tanker
clings to the horizon. I am hot
and bothered. I rise sighing from my mat.
The children hoot. I amble my reluctant
earthbound feet towards the cheering sea.