PENTWATER POEMS

Since 1987, my family and I have vacationed on the west Michigan shore just north of Pentwater, right on Lake Michigan. Over the years, I've written about the lake, wave, beach, and sea.

Pentwater

When I look at the water

at the height of the horizon,

the wave becomes the measure

of distraction—one from one.

Thought without language,

apparition of ecstasy,

the dappled expanse of gray

is a pure solution of age.

A glint in glinting tangles,

perturbation of the lens.

Light, facets, and the angles

form a lid, a cloud of sense.

The shadows of clouds roam,

dousing the frenetic foam,

like jealous ghosts of ideas

haunting insistent memories.

The wind dies.  The waves turn

into breakers, cresting, lurch

beyond themselves and churn

the trough line of their search

to the end of their sameness

on the slanted, abrupt shore,

or in further, final caresses

of the afterthoughtful shore.

Or I dive into their crests,

heaving breast upon breast,

then stand and see them dead

beneath receding waves ahead.

Only the sun is witness, red

as an old apple on a bed,

as an old eye as it slides

beneath its trembling eyelid.

The gulls scream, adding song

to the air, fish, water, refuse,

light—the things that they use—

sing the meaning in their songs.

Sestina: The Lake Michigan Shore

I stand knee deep in high waves

And wait for the darkening sky

To loose what it’s long held back,

A cataract of warm rain,

Like a proliferation of clear ideas

A mind no longer contained.

I read a book with no ideas,

A tangle of clouds in empty sky.

I couldn’t read it front to back

Or back to front. All it contained

Was words, single drops of rain

Or particles that were also waves.

The smallest moth is contained

In a cluster of dusty ideas

Within the vastness of the sky.

It clings to rotten wood, its back

As camouflaged as water in waves.

It is not moved by the fiercest rain.

The lake is high after endless rain,

An excess of lightning finally contained. 

The sun sweetly burns my back

Until it slips into a rift in the sky.

I find relief diving — the waves

Drown me with persistent ideas.

The sun slowly escapes the sky

Into the horizon, earth-shadow-contained.

Still air can’t raise a single wave

Or loose even one drop of rain.

All I see is the cessation of ideas.

For the night there’s no turning back.

I’ve known myself to talk to sky,

To write incessantly in rain,

And all I’ve said eschews ideas.

On my last day here I turned back

From the lake with waves

Of farewell, memory contained.

At home, the sky is bereft of ideas,

As the garden is of rain. It’s good to be back,

The lake contained but for dreaming waves.

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.

Try

The man walks along the lake,

His hair and clothes wild, unkempt.

He’s lost all that he could take

From life and love, and the attempt

To understand the meaning of I.

The waves wash up to his naked feet,

As if to urge him once more to try.

Where the horizon and the skies meet,

He sees himself, a constellation,

So far away, fleet and improbable,

Drunkenly spinning concatenations

Of entropy and incessant babble.

Surf on Rocks

I know the articulation of waves

As I know the flexing of my hand.

(The big northwestern wind is a muscle

That bashed ten thousand sailors to their graves,

But on the beach can only roil sand,

Turning the inert fleck to corpuscle.)

I used to grow dizzy diving at them,

When my spine rippled and began to twist,

The pain a sweet knotting from calf to wrist —

To wet eyes the sun an exploded gem.

I’d grow nauseous and stumble to the shore,

But the waves, I knew, just wanted me more.
Sucking it into its fat belly’s sway,
The surf last winter stole the beach away.

Number

The number of dates

Ever proliferates.

Each, pinned down, waits

Until all are done —

One and one and one.

We wake and sleep and wake

Without the slightest break

In the dropped mirror

Of each memory’s error.

I remember tomorrow,

Waves of it, row on row,

Just within my reach

On this particulate beach

That myriad suns bleach.

Erosion

Forgetting is memory erosion,

As though sand is being drawn

From a beach by high ocean

Waves. It returns like fall dawn,

Each day a bit dimmer,

But never completely gone.

I am not a strong swimmer

And fear the undertow

More than the shark’s shimmer

Coming at me from below.

I think him an old emotion

I still, but vaguely, know —

Toothless, a dying pet’s devotion.

View from the Dunes

I asked my youngest why the grains of sand,

After millennia in roiled water,

Grow only so small and no smaller.

(Wouldn’t gold dissolve if endlessly panned?)

“Maybe they’re too tiny,” said my daughter,

“To be abrasive anymore.” Last year,

A storm raked off ten feet of grassy dunes,

Leaving jagged walls and crumbling wounds.

The long-buried sand was the same as here

On the upper ledge, unchanged under tons’

Gravitational grinding of eons.

The waves, gale-wind-whipped, tip over and drop,

And even in the stillest air never stop.

Each grain of sand changes less than the suns.

Wind Storm on Lake Michigan

The waters are the solution of time,

(I’m not the only being to have said),

Forever stirred in its lake or sea bed

By wind or current; in its essence, prime,

Like 2, 3, 5, 7, or 11,

Or in some quantity, 97.

After all these many eons, “years,”

The solution is not nearly resolved—

Duration hasn’t thoroughly evolved

To nothing. Let us be content with tears.

Today, gale winds beat the waves to a moil

That tore the sand from the beach, turning

The water brown as the next wave’s recoil

Threw back the sand into the hour’s churning.

The Wave

I dove and dove into the next crest;
Then, dizzy, with my spine wrenched, I floated, 
Face down, standing when sand brushed my chest.
Each wave yearns, its will pure and devoted 
To reaching the afterlife of the shore.
As it thins to wash, there is nothing more.
I've thrashed and pummeled the waves, throwing 
Myself, breast and head first, for an hour, 
Unthinking with laughter, gulps of knowing, 
Loosing myself into the wave's power.
I know, not every one dies on the beach.
Those farthest out tip high and flatten out.
I swim well, but they're beyond my reach.
New waves will rise and peak beyond doubt.

Seascape

The ocean is the solution of time
And for a billion years it has dissolved
Itself into itself, into hours so fine
Eternity is perfectly resolved.
The sea reflects a sky the sky can't be,
A version of a face we recognize,
Inverted, what a broken mirror sees,
A lovely woman without any eyes.
The sails of fishing craft traverse the sun
And leave some wind to calibrate the waves.
As men haul nets over the horizon,
The day dives slowly into its deep grave.
We stand and watch it all from sea-wracked beach,
A universe that's ours, beyond our reach.