Sitting on this tree thrown up
From the sea, its tangle of roots
Letting the wind go through,
I look down the beach: at old
Horseshoe crabs, broken skates,
Sand dollars, sea horses, as though
Only primeval creatures get destroyed,
At chunks of sea-mud still quivering,
At the light glinting off the water
And the billion facets of the sand,
At their moment of shining the wind
Blows over the dunes as they creep.
*
Sit down
By the clanking shore
Of this bitter, beloved sea,
Pluck shells from the icy surf,
Fans of gold light, sunbursts,
Lift one to the sun
As a sign you accept to go
When the time comes to the shrine of the dead.
*
This bleached root
Drifted from some other shore,
Brittle, cold, practically weightless, worn
Down to the lost grip it always essentially was.
If it has lost hold
It at least keeps
The shape of what it held,
And is the hand itself
Of that gravel, one of earth’s
Wandering icons of "to have."
*
I sit listening
To the surf as it falls,
The power and inexhaustible freshness of the sea,
The suck and inner boom
As a wave tears free and crashes back
In overlapping thunders going away down the beach.
It is the most we know of time,
And it is our undermusic of eternity.
*
I think of how I
Sat by a dying woman,
Her shell of a hand
Wet and cold in both of mine,
Light, nearly out, existing as smoke.
I remember the glow of her wan, absorbed smile.
*
Under the wind
That moans in the grass
And whistles through crabs' claws
I sit holding this little lamp,
This icy fan of the sun.
Across gull tracks
And wind ripples in the sand
The wind seethes. Footprints behind me
Slogging for the absolute
Already begin vanishing.
*
What does he really love,
That old man,
His wrinkled eyes
Tortured by smoke,
Walking in the ungodly
Rasp and cackle of old flesh?
The swan dips its head
And peers at the mystic
In-life of the sea,
The gull drifts up
And eddies toward heaven,
The breeze in its arms…
Nobody likes to die
But an old man
Can know
A gratefulness
Toward time that kills him,
Everything he loved was made of it.
From the sea, its tangle of roots
Letting the wind go through,
I look down the beach: at old
Horseshoe crabs, broken skates,
Sand dollars, sea horses, as though
Only primeval creatures get destroyed,
At chunks of sea-mud still quivering,
At the light glinting off the water
And the billion facets of the sand,
At their moment of shining the wind
Blows over the dunes as they creep.
*
Sit down
By the clanking shore
Of this bitter, beloved sea,
Pluck shells from the icy surf,
Fans of gold light, sunbursts,
Lift one to the sun
As a sign you accept to go
When the time comes to the shrine of the dead.
*
This bleached root
Drifted from some other shore,
Brittle, cold, practically weightless, worn
Down to the lost grip it always essentially was.
If it has lost hold
It at least keeps
The shape of what it held,
And is the hand itself
Of that gravel, one of earth’s
Wandering icons of "to have."
*
I sit listening
To the surf as it falls,
The power and inexhaustible freshness of the sea,
The suck and inner boom
As a wave tears free and crashes back
In overlapping thunders going away down the beach.
It is the most we know of time,
And it is our undermusic of eternity.
*
I think of how I
Sat by a dying woman,
Her shell of a hand
Wet and cold in both of mine,
Light, nearly out, existing as smoke.
I remember the glow of her wan, absorbed smile.
*
Under the wind
That moans in the grass
And whistles through crabs' claws
I sit holding this little lamp,
This icy fan of the sun.
Across gull tracks
And wind ripples in the sand
The wind seethes. Footprints behind me
Slogging for the absolute
Already begin vanishing.
*
What does he really love,
That old man,
His wrinkled eyes
Tortured by smoke,
Walking in the ungodly
Rasp and cackle of old flesh?
The swan dips its head
And peers at the mystic
In-life of the sea,
The gull drifts up
And eddies toward heaven,
The breeze in its arms…
Nobody likes to die
But an old man
Can know
A gratefulness
Toward time that kills him,
Everything he loved was made of it.
Galway Kinnell
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