Tuesday, July 6, 2010

WAVES

The night will not give in to dreams.
The blood surges, remembering the beach,
where the wind drove the waves in teams.

What is it that the waves teach --
a vanishing point as ephemeral
as any the sky and the waters reach.

Excess of motion, rising to hurl
against the barricades of air,
falls . . . back into itself unfurls.

Inexorable—that sense in a nightmare
that is terror—the waves think
wave on wave to a deafening tintamarre.

There is no conclusion. Ideas sink
beneath the idea that follows,
visions turn to vision with a blink.

Is that all interpretation allows?
My thoughts ran to other things
as I stood lock-kneed in the shallows.

Whitecaps, feathered like seagull’s wings,
beat themselves in a luscious foam,
and etched the beach with sectioned rings.

And like the white space in a poem,
the troughs between each wave held
true, as line upon line washed home.

Would understanding forces that meld
curve to nested curve, that swell
the inhaling tide, that seamlessly weld

a form to its proportion, tell
me if the surf is a deity’s gift
and not a repeated curse from Hell?

Then the balance—a feather adrift
upon the breeze, cartwheeling down the beach;
how the fretful gusts would lift

it always just beyond the reach
of the sandy slip. I watch it seem
fearless, playful, dodging each
wavelet . . . and so begin to dream.

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