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.