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# “Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
- URL: https://poetry101.love/any-fool-can-get-into-an-ocean/
- Published: 2025-04-26T16:52:47.000Z
- Updated: 2025-04-26T16:52:47.000Z
- Description: by Jack Spicer
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Jack Spicer, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

Any fool can get into an ocean   
But it takes a Goddess   
To get out of one.  
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,  
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming   
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed  
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess  
To get back out of them  
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly  
Out in the middle of the poem  
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the  
 water hardly moves  
You might get out through all the waves and rocks  
Into the middle of the poem to touch them  
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long  
Enough to want to start backward  
That’s when the fun starts  
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural  
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown  
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth  
But it takes a hero to get out of one  
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course  
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

Spicer, Jack. [My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.](https://www.google.com/books/edition/My%5FVocabulary%5FDid%5FThis%5Fto%5FMe/-jJ%5FWrQEgR0C?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love) Ukraine, Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

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## Why I chose this poem

I ran across this in an email search, and I don't remember reading it or sending it, but I can clearly see why I would have. I have a thing for 

And so, it's not lost on me that I was searching because I had gone into the labyrinth of a fractured family relationship. And there's something, too, about the metaphor of water. The [first poem here](https://poetry101.love/introduction-to-poetry/), for example:  
  
 I want them to waterski  
 across the surface of a poem  
 waving at the author’s name on the shore.  
  
Not sure if I'm just less cynical or what, but it makes me sad, the way the speaker pronounces to his dear, "Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural / You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown . . . it takes a hero to get out of one." Perhaps that's just a little piece of why [The Heroine's Journey](https://www.amazon.com/Heroines-Journey-Maureen-Murdock/dp/0877734852?ref=poetry101.love) was so important to me.