The Great Ocean
if of your gifts and your destructions, Ocean, into my hands
you could deliver one part, one fruit, one ferment
I would choose your remote repose, your lines of steel,
your vastness watched over by the air and night,
and the energy of your white language
smashing and overturning its own columns
in its purifying acts of demolition.
it's not the last wave with its salty weight
that grinds against the coasts and manufactures
the peaceful bands of sand that ring the world:
it is in the central volume of your strength
the ever-extending power of your waters,
the still solitude brimming with lives.
time, perhaps, or overflowing cup
of all known motion, a pure oneness
that death has never sealed, green viscera
of blazing absolute totality.
of the sunken arm that throws up a drop of water
nothing remains but a kiss of salt. Of the bodies
of mankind along your shores a misty scent
of wet flowers is all that lasts. Your energy
seems to slip away without ever being exhausted,
it seems to circle back into your calm.
The wave that you let loose,
arc of identity, exploded feather,
when it was unleashed it was only foam,
and without being wasted came back to be born.
All of your strength returns to its beginning.
All that you leave are crushed shards of remains,
empty husks your load scooped out and scattered,
what was expelled by the action of your abundance,
all that was left of its clustered fruit of being.
Your statue casts its shadow far beyond the waves.
Alive and arranged like the chest and the robe
of a single creature and its steady breathing,
lifted in material forms of light,
great prairies raised up by the heaving waves,
they shape the naked skin of the whole planet.
You flood your own being with your very sustenance.
