Coastlines
….. 1
Barnacles cinch
sea-battered pilings.
Dog whelks maraud in mud.
How the North Atlantic
wrangles the rocks!
Above, the houses of the fishermen
look matchstick but are fierce.
They hold to the skittish boulders with all their might.
Next door, in the wired-off
graveyard of the cove,
the headstones lean aslant,
scripture pages thumbed down by the wind.
Below them the ocean
seethes and scathes all day,
all night, and the spray
smokes where it slaps the shore.
Tide pools boil with foam.
On coastlines you realize
what world will last.
See how the lean light
glances against granite.
Erosion gorges the coastline out,
nibbles the gaps.
You feel a shiver in
the ocean’s memory.
….. 2
What if this coastal road, these roofs
vivid against the ocean, these
steeples and these gas
stations, what if these docks and piers and
marinas, these tough
white houses and their windowboxes,
stood only in the minute’s multitude?
What if each minute made its universe?
What if in our hands we held the world
breakable and rainbow-velveted as mere
wobbling bubbles that our children blow?
I feel my skin, I feel my face,
yield to the light as coastlines yield,
accepting the loving
phosphorescence of daylight’s
demarcation. I feel
the violence of all its delicacy.
….. 3
Coastlines are where our opposites ignite
and no one can say, After all, it’s all right.
Coastlines are where your father and your mother
turn without a word forever from each other.
Coastlines are where the quick-footed sun
touches Ultima Thule and can no longer run.
Coastlines are where we learn the ocean’s tradgedy:
incessant endeavor, incessant panoply,
broken down to crumbs of nothingness
and yet we want to bless
each ragged repetition of the waves,
so inconsolable, so close to us.
by Eric Ormsby
from For a Modest God
Grove Press Poetry Series, 1992