Payments accepted via:
|
Tides
I come again to the shore, to the jetty, my heart
sick, slick, black, and impenetrable as the stones.
I know somehow that I am denser than when young,
graver, but without the enduring pretense of the breakwater.
I grin at its insensible denial of the waves caressing erosion;
and then, in turn, am mocked by a watery chortle
reminding me that my demise is so much more imminent,
evident, and transient that the inanimate stone.
The ocean has closed already over my green love
long before I had the chance to extract or exercise its charm.
And, unless some unnatural act should blast it into infusion,
this jetty will lift other feet, other eyes, other loins,
and the chances of other hearts long after I am gone.
The ocean rolls to the shore, crinoline with froth,
teasing nubile girls with immortality. The hems
of their cotton dresses are salted with this possibility.
They will learn from the Atlantic its profusion,
and, like turtles, bury their own eggs in the sands of time.
These nests are inhumed in chests of hope, and
no one knows it better than the rock-pier and my soul,
both black-slickered, barnacled, and festooned
with the slimey weeds of duration and ennui.
I do not share the pregnant faith of transcending the temporal,
nor posture that I can decipher the deeper dive from now.
It is enough, in this mottled gloaming, that the rocks and I
resist encroachment, perhaps both intuiting that true eternity
holds with the ephemera skittering along the shore.
It is in moments of sunstruck beauty that mans dominion
refracts over the deep, deep, but nonetheless, fathomable sea.
And I know that I am not alone...
- Ellis Glover
2003
|
|