Surfing With Strangers

An Irish surfer takes a giant wave 

above a dark seaweed clump 

I had thought was animal—I wished 

was manta ray, I wished was porpoise, 

even octopus—and one commenter joked 

was Mick singing Paint It Black, 

the soundtrack of this video clip. 

Instagram levity. Red board surfer high 

on breaker’s 40th foot, turns, descends 

ahead of fluffy crest, and draws a brine line 

on gray as oceanic walls make chase, conquer 

in a boil—“where the energy passes over 

undulations in the reef below,” one man 

lyrically explains to me. Instagram 

graciousness. All my questions answered. 

I know boil. I banged seabed, gulped coughs 

of salt-churn, bodysurfing in my youth, 

not knowing energy passed over me, over 

undulations. There’s no reef off Avalon, 

perhaps just imbalances of girl and undertow. 

I’m guessing. It happened rarely, though. 

This looks like turbulence that swallows 

the guy. “Epic. Take a bow, Conor Maguire,” 

Dublinsocial identifies. Instagram reverence. 

On YouTube, I look up Maguire (hearing 

“Maguinn and McGuire, just a gettin’ higher,” 

bouncing through my ears.) Mullaghmore Head. 

Medics on jet skis. He rides a sixty-footer, 

crest crashing in clouds, one that evaporates 

enough for us to see him surfing a circulating room 

of friction—violence, even. That’s how a wave 

break is described. It doesn’t seem violent 

when jumping waves in a yard depth of Atlantic, 

turning and leaping ahead, arms stretched 

and face down, but it’s energy speedily propelling 

a flexible body from waist-deep water to ankle, 

for survivable fun. I look up Shipsterns—

“one of the gnarliest boils in surfing,” an Italian 

replies to me, weeks later—and watch a surfer 

disengage from his board on quickly forming steps 

of jut-out wave in the Tasman Sea and land on it, 

slip forward as if in thrilling escape, and get boiled. 

It’s not all men crushed thus, though it was 

almost all men replying to me on Dublinsocial’s 

Instagram. Princess Kelea was the best surfer 

in 1445, in Hawaii. 400 years after, defiance 

of missionaries took the form of a princess 

paddling into the break. I’d like to be allowed 

inside a green curl of this planet, balanced 

on a tabletop of fiberglass with a dorsal fin, 

and maybe be the same as a porpoise or a ray.

Note: Quotes from @wucebrillis2, @Dougphillipsphoto, @Dublinsocial @gianpaoloperrone, as well as a “Creeque Alley” lyric by The Mamas & The Papas

Amy Holmanis a poet and literary consultant. She’s the author of four poetry chapbooks and two collections, most recently Captive (Saddle Road Press, 2023), and writes the Substack newsletter What Where: Literary Journals. Poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry and Verse Daily, and nominated for Pushcarts by journal editors. Recent prose and poetry have appeared in  Airplane Reading, -ette review, Gargoyle and Pine Hills Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and must do without bodysurfing the waves.