Harbor, after

Harbor, after

gazing after sunscald, I
was visited by seven wraiths, hovering along the break.

Next to me, a child, not mine,
a mother, not mine,
hurled shells in recognition.
Raven bobbing on the floating dock.

In this middle distance from the island,
like land only you recognize the abandonment of the world, 
like land only you recognize the abundance of the world,
we dream with new eyes open —
as if named something other: 
shale, nutmeg, quinine,
and other things well-traveled. 

A boat in the port is on fire.
Beyond, the water shows its skin — a dance of
cat tongue ragged and madrone smooth
— you step into the view.

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D and I recently took a trip over to one of the PNW islands for a short writing weekend. This poem is from that time. The low sun creates penetrating glares off the water this time of year, making a fiction of whatever you see next. In the last week or so that image has emerged twice in very different ways. Perhaps the connection is that both, in some way, make light a door, or make sun-kissed water into a veil. Here’s the other poem:

Staring at the sun, and other too bright things

Is it human protagonism or cinema only
that cascades reverie upon seeing shapes, backlit and blotty, tracing the beach, only
two out today — a full size, a kid size, hands like a latch — only
its a hand you can no longer hold and a hand you can no longer hold with, only
that’s ok, that’s how things go, only
you wish there was something you had said, maybe wiser than your years, only
maybe you did, memory persists like a tidepool, only
present some hours and then swallowed, only
the vastness remaining, only
the vastness taking, leaving only
your own lesion
a scarf flapping lonely
in the howling

This second poem surprised me. The image of two backlit silhouettes on a beach is so cinematic, so engrained in our consciousness. At this particular moment, I was on a run one morning and had to stop and sit on a bench and this just kinda fell out. Strange!

With gratitude,