I could use your help here. I’ve lost a poem. I know what it’s about: a man determined never to return to the sea, who nevertheless can’t forget the love he feels for the vast reaches of the salt ocean. I’ve tried searching the net for the only line I remember from the poem, and I keep getting the John Masefield poem with ‘a tall ship and a star to steer her by’, but that’s not the poem that’s taken up residence in my long term memory. 

            There’s the Dylan Thomas poem in which he says that as a boy, ‘I sang in my chains like the sea.’ I’ve been to his boyhood house in Swansea and to the little cabin overlooking the sea where he wrote many of his poems, and I can identify with the sentiment. The thought of the ocean often lingers at the edges of my waking and drowsing mind.

            I can’t help wondering if it’s a sort of inborn trait. My grandfather was a chief engineer in the merchant navy and my father used to row a whaling boat for pleasure on the Firth of Forth when he was young. Courtesy of my cousin, I once got to sail under the Forth Bridge with its elegant Victorian cantilevers, and I remember a dolphin arcing around us in the cold water. But I’m no old salt. My natural habitat is on a plush armchair with a book, or with a laptop on my…well, you know, on my lap.

            Lake Ontario is a real presence in the Requiem books. Burlington sits on a long slope, from the cliff-like escarpment to the neatly manicured shoreline of the great lake. I enjoy the lakeside ambience, and the fourth Weiss novel pretty much hugs the beach strip as it curves down towards Hamilton. On a grey day with the sky heavy with storm clouds, however, the lake transforms in my mind into a horizonless ocean. 

            In the Requiem novel, I’m working on, Carly Rouhl looks out over the lake from a cottage window. There’s a storm beating the lake waters down and darkening the expanse of Burlington Bay. She hears music from an old pianola in the basement, and in a few moments, she will walk down the stairs to the past—which lives on the other side of an old bricked-up and buried doorway onto the beach. It’s a past in which boats used to anchor just offshore to listen to the big bands playing at the Sky Club of the old Brant Inn. That must have been something: to hear Stan Kenton or the Glenn Miller Orchestra from the lake, their rhythms rolling over the great echo chamber of the bay.

            Truth is, I’ve always had a longing for the open water and I drive to the Atlantic coast whenever I can. The Firth of Forth is a sort of fiord of salt water that winds in from the North Sea into the ancient heart of Edinburgh, and growing up I was aware of its closeness. We would go to the seaside and I would pick my way over the salt pools alive with tiny crabs and seaweed. At North Berwick, just a short drive up the firth from Edinburgh, there was a public swimming pool that was in essence just a low wall. At high tide the salt water would flood the pool area, holding a little bit of the ocean hostage for our personal pleasure when the tide went out.

            In my mind at least, I had a fairly idyllic childhood, full of swans and old men pushing model yachts out from the shore with long poles. 

            Which is why “The sea with its long green lips is eating my heart away.” 

            And that’s the line, right at the end of the poem, that I remember. If you come across it, please let me know.