The most unsettling thing about the sea in "Rip Tide" is how well-mannered it is at the start. "The surf is calm the sky / clear and quiet," the speaker says, and only then does the water turn: "abruptly / the shore recedes." The grammar matters here. The shore moves, not the swimmers, as if the land has slipped its moorings. Danger arrives with no warning, and the poem's mood grows from that betrayal of appearances.
Dominique Cyprès tells the story in plain free verse with no rhyme, no regular metre and no punctuation at all, not even a full stop. This has real effects. Dialogue loses its quotation marks and slides into narration: "i don't like how far out it's pulling us / he says and i agree." Speech, thought and action run together in one breathless stream, much as they do in a panic. The lines also break on small, unstable words such as "like," "where," "at" and "than," so the reader keeps tipping forward onto the next line. "We try to swim back and end / up further out where / his feet do not touch the sand" is the clearest case, because the line break itself carries them out.
The middle of the poem is about a reversal of roles. When the partner panics, the verbs pile up with no commas to separate them: "he / founders gasps panics." The speaker imagines the worst ("i picture him dying / alone in the sea") and then acts: "now i am behind him digging / my toes into the sand at / every trough." That "now" marks the move from imagining to doing. The instructions that follow, "ordering him not to panic" and telling him to "let the next wave push him / toward the shore," go against instinct. To survive, they must stop fighting the water and make use of it. The shore is "now / growing dim" at this point, which quietly hints at the fog still to come.
The sister is the most ambiguous figure. She is "stumbling in the shallows," a phrase that suggests clumsiness and also the safe, ankle-deep world the swimmers have been dragged away from. They "wave," and the gesture could be a greeting or a signal for help, so the poem lets it mean both. She starts toward them, then turns to seek help "when / we vigorously shake our heads." The poem never explains the head-shaking, but it reads as a refusal to let a second person be pulled into danger, a decision made without words while they are still struggling.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than an account of a close escape. The one feeling word, "mercifully," arrives as the shore draws closer. Then the weather turns: "an apocalyptic fog has settled / on everything dampening / the sound of the breakers." The opening gave a clear sky hiding a deadly current, and the close gives a safe beach wrapped in end-of-the-world gloom. The muffled sound suits the speaker's numbness, as if the world has been turned down after too much noise.
The last lines reduce the evidence of what happened to almost nothing: "apart from this change / in the weather and / our shared memories / this event now has no more reality than / a bad dream about drowning." This almost repeats the opening phrase, but the earlier simile ("like / the start of a bad dream") has hardened into a verdict. The poem is circular, and its structure echoes the idea that the experience cannot be held onto. Having been saved, the speaker finds the danger already dissolving into unreality, with only two people's memories as proof.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It offers no triumph and no moral about courage, though the speaker's calm is clearly impressive. It records instead the odd, deflated feeling that follows a brush with death, when something enormous happened and the world seems to have no record of it. By ending in the same words that began it, the poem leaves the reader a little unsure where the dream stops and the real beach begins.