Friendly Cove

Down an overgrown drive, translucent, I can see through
to the muck below but choose instead to search for
starfish and shells in the calm ripple. Seems
a miracle to be dropped here, up until
and including tonight, myself of foreign metal born
and you asleep on the latticework, my head
up in the rafters and your heart tending the radishes
(for the rabbits!) two innocent bystanders trespassing together
the one gate beyond which lies freedom, death, release
(though not always in that order) which warbles somber safety,
set at a distance from the lighthouse rocks, from the
gladiolas, irises and tulip bulbs.

Sometimes it takes a mirror to shut us up, sometimes a wall;
other times the horizon is a carpet lapping at our doorstep,
smoothing out our footsteps. Sometimes we
sit on stones near the white trees to watch the water
unfold and unfold and unfold, then falls
the tides to crease the eyes once more with their churning.
Today the liquid glass, once turned, upends them all,
a crowded beach but none to see them curled along the spine
of this shelf of surf. Take it all away, wash the edges round:
stare at it till you see it everywhere you look, till you
see it on your eyelids. Maybe it all goes away, maybe it
never was -- hope and despair, a book of pages turned --
not by memory but by insistence alone the light's trace
is preserved. The summer cold off the west coast, Arctic air,

is winter somewhere else, but here it means days spent
with the rest of the driftwood, dank and smelling of salt,
writing memories in a notebook, grain of sand by
grain of sand, drawing inspiration from the same
single body of waves that has ever crashed.
What am I but my own twist on this and that,
spending the afternoons drifting in circles, mapping
my footprints, following where they land. The ocean
drowns us out with its insistence: rhythmic, in
a trance; I write this down before we forget.


2011