My Father as Wave

Mobi Warren

We came to the sea to celebrate our father’s 98th 
birthday. He died a year ago shortly after his 97th.

Gulf waters soughed in crackled sighs. Water bands 
shifted hue from brown near shore to jade-green 

farther out until deepest blue. We watched wind 
move across the surface, how it spun water 

into small orbits, engined a steady wave that writhed 
like a sea dragon and bit the shore to ring the ear. 

In the heady early days of the Space Program, 
our father studied the effects of weightlessness 

on the ear’s semicircular canals, biomechanical
sensors with their own wave mechanics 

that orient the self in space. When I was ten,
I danced a polka with him. He swung me around,

lifted my feet off the ground. I felt momentarily
weightless but held secure in his fatherly orbit.

Today, the shore was shell-speckled as though 
nereids had walked there snapping necklace

strands while singing soft laments. I gathered 
gulf wedge clams with curved growth bands

of navy and chalk, orange and ivory, the curled
shard of a lettered olive. I cradled shells

in my hand that once housed tender sea bodies
that clocked the meter of the waves. Back home, 

I placed them in a small bowl carved from walnut
by our father when he was fourteen, wedge marks 

of his knife rippling the wood’s grain. Waves 
of memory spill and tow. Our father’s life wells 

and recedes within us, never distant yet also far 
at sea. My ear still bends to the wave of his voice.

The Science

As an Air Force flight surgeon and Aerospace Medical researcher in the early 1960s, my father pioneered early research into the effects of weightlessness on astronauts, including impacts on the ear’s semicircular canals that help a person orient oneself in space. These canals are filled with fluid and move when you rotate your head. My father helped devise, and served as test subject, an experiment to measure the canals’ sensitivity to weightless states that involved achieving zero-gravity in an F-100F aircraft put through a series of rolls. I found myself musing how the movement of fluid in the ear might be compared to the movement of ocean waves, as family trips to the seashore remain a favorite memory. My father’s love of science along with his own unique gravitas was carried on another type of wave, the sound of his resonant voice that always helped to orient me.

The Poet

Mobi Warren (she/her) is a poet and naturalist from San Antonio, Texas, a retired Mathematics educator, author of the chapbook Thread and Nectar, and co-founder of Stone in the Stream, a regional collective of eco-poets and artists. She facilitates writing workshops, including ‘The Poet as Citizen Scientist’.

Next poem: Parsing Ocean by Suzy Harris