WAVEY

 

 

As always, now this need to reach the outer

brow of land, no matter how far off the seas

across a human habitation clouding

like a rash sweet rills and leas.

Why creep through incrustation

blasting like a dread disease

the face of comely planet?  What salvation

waits a half a continent away, until

I dwell in swelling sense of celebration,

standing still at tidal sill

adorned with blue scarf curled and

island centered on it fill

the eye?  To end as I began, where world is

small and tide is high, might bless with rising life

the brooding headlands.  Ever eastward hurled with

weather, pilgrim wander, wife

to Avalon, to North, by

compass driven where time’s knife

of ice has riven oldest hills on earth.  My

merry, wrinkled hills go swimming where I fix

my foot and face the sea.  They tumble forth like

babes or wedding guests, round hicks

in pink and blue and mauve.  Land

torn from another world, old mixed

in young, new continent with old close-woven,

parent in the child enfolded, who can say

where one begins and other ends?  Hills dove and

islands surfaced in the bay.

Now who can say what love has

joined them at the valley, way

of water?  How their borders move above as

rise or fall of sea require?  What seiche foretells

where soul and body differ?  When the cove was

empty as a corpse, caged bell’s

enduring knell sang loudly,

“Alleluia, tide still wells,

Creator and Redeemer.”  Voyage out, we

sought to shape the city to our praise and craved

control of nature, whether world without we

mastered, world within we braved.

The voyage back, a random

beauty gives life meaning, saved

from talus on the floor our arts abandon,

read in talus on the shore.  Did glacier run

for this, to catch our composition’s ransom,

pour it from the mountain, ton

on ton to pave the verge and

decorate the meadow?  One

may feel for painted evergreens and birch in

pallid ledges leaning, longing felt when young

for absent lover’s face at soft hot surging

core from where all forms are wrung.

Consume and keep, we said who

hope to be consumed by tongue

of holy fires and rocked in stony bed to

music of the spheres as part of all we thought,

believed in, knew and were.  Before I wed new

forms, for now paths I have sought,

halls, currents blaze in mind the

trails I tread, dear custom-taught,

along the landscape of my soul, that binds a

world to its reflection, saves in little all

it pictures.  Now we cling to life in tidal

lands beyond the terminal

moraines, in the shadow

of the raptor.  If it fall

upon me and I know it, sinking at slow

passes, bitter-tasting death washes back

black and brackish in the mouth.  But sad though

mortal state may be, some crack

in armor of the plane or

passenger, so long as lack

of knowledge of our coming end may deign, our

life flows forth untouched by death, however sure,

however lying soon or late in wait for

us.  If vigor, bloom endure,

in what sense are we dying?

For the time allowed, the lure

of place is immortality.  In thriving

age, the best places never are much changed.

A hundred years, and all the dear surviving

will be gone, but seas so strange

if not forever, longer

linger.  River runs its range

and streams into the sea as if to longed-for

assignation, flings embrace of silver veins

out over heaving darkness.  Is it stronger

like Aurelius the Sane

to leave one’s mark and die, or

to surrender on the wane

and gain the general flood?  Whatever prior

thought is gone, nothing goes to nothing.  Can

the soul by losing self in formless mire

put on power of the land

or quicken with the water?

Trust this spill from awkward hand

of littoral meanings, an unbeliever’s psalter:

blood and sweat and tears will always be of salt.