This is a language I can’t fully speak but clearly these waves break the way they break with intention. I couldn’t remember the topography of this beach, thought rocks not sand, misplaced the tree that straddles the void where the yellow clay blank was bitten by the surf, although I’ve been here many times as myself, and as someone else. There must be a shallow bar where the waves are breaking, beyond that, the steely […]
Just past the pier a sea lion, briefly and two dorsal fins like piqued interest very present and transient only a few kids saw them and exited the water but at a certain point there’s no longer a point to reticence– consider the odds or don’t it still goes out like a sigh, the tide the pier stretching out into the open Pacific like the longest exclamation
like low tide but lower like after the sun sets still light but transient block print birds flying south loss indelible and loss suggested
The sky now the correct gray– sea-derived, the summer’s fires gone out, the focus turning slowly inward, like a tide returning, an impartial action, attribute to it whatever you’d like, it won’t attach and it won’t last and that is some sort of beautiful– every night a blank page. The gingko starts to shiver
back from the ocean city night sounds windows open to let the night in what else to say it hums with some energy not unlike a tide changing also gradually but impossible to refute not unlike this sunburn or how much I’m missing you
The night before a departure, waiting for that balm of Not Here. It’s supposed to come in threes, but between worse, and worst– I mean, I can’t even tell if this food has gone bad– implications are tiring. I’m going to the ocean, to take in the water’s endless rehearsal and the steady, steady shore, to live in the littoral– there’s not one thing that isn’t somehow in motion, just I wish they sometimes weren’t
another day box-like in progression, predictability, oh inflexibility of time– I’d rather an ocean I’d rather that ocean sound that imperfect rhythm constant yet somehow revelatory I know the pilgrim changes it’s not the pilgrimage per se but things are always more tolerable somewhere else
Another night like drowning– sometimes a tide comes up further than expected and lacking air a body cannot perform voluntary efforts to seek attention– I sink into a drink knowing day will rise again from this watery dark– less phoenix, more albatross, but, any port in storm–
(continuing on with the ocean poems in response to this business–) You tell me about Oaxaca. I tell you about the Gulf, and then we talk about how we both almost moved to Hawaii, once. Maybe we would have met there, too, you say, as we survey the skyline’s tines from out across the bay. It’s strange, how language tries to make distinctions between bodies of saltwater– they all commute, or aren’t we proof? […]
A neap tide now— so jealous of the shore but just think of how much ocean never once touches land so long have I endured this thirst have hollowed out and cambered bones to search and search and if I waver it is only as a breaker holds itself fleetingly in disbelief before it falls like thunder, and arrives, abruptly, finally—
OPTIONAL POETRY 