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Aldeburgh Beach
This morning the waves are restless.
Underneath them things are living out their lives.
Pebbles are piled up at the sea-edge
as if trickled from a huge hand.
Each one has its own genealogy,
a parent rock, a place it has travelled from.
The fine rain is almost horizontal.
I breathe it in, dissolve it into my blood.
The sea is happiest as froth, stretching out
its fingers, skipping faster, making shapes.
When it bangs itself onto the shore
it feels a release
as if moving its shoulder-blades diagonally
one way and then the other.
by Fiona Robyn
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Waterspout
Waterspout a tooth out of heaven
bites down slowly hollow like a viper’s
You can see it sending displeasure through
The water is disturbed and sends up vapor
like smoke from a drill bit If it bites deep
it may spin fishes till scales fly off
from their bodies You can hear it
rushing through downpour with a sound
like vacuuming and small coins falling
by Allan Peterson
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Nye Winter Sun Day
central Oregon coast
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Bobbi Kirk
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What We Ate After Passing the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins
28 Noviembre 1520, Antonio Pigafetta
My Lord, it was the Feast of Saint Ursula.
Thus was Fernando moved to name the cape
we rounded after passing the straits
of Tierra del Fuego. There were of course no such creatures
to be seen. Only the sea, always the sea,
its tangles of kelp matted like hair
wanting the ministrations of a tortoise-shell comb…
It is many, many months since our last memory
of women: candled fingertips touched to holy
water in the basin, pale ankles glimpsed as they ascended
dark stairways leading to rooms suffused with the mingled
scent of rancid sausages and violets…
The hardships we have endured! Three months
and twenty days since we laid bare the last of our provisions.
All that remains we eat: old biscuits ground to powder,
sifted with grubs and sawdust. We soaked
strips of ox-hide from the main-yard in sea water, then
roasted them on coals. This is how
we entered the Cape of Desire—retching and heaving;
and those calm waters which Fernando christened
Pacific. The horizon a line
clean as a hem of bleached muslin, rippling in the wind.
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White Heron Wading
by the willow, where fish
freeze in the dark shadow
of cascading green.
Be still cry the gills.
The heron tilts its head
watching for a ripple,
some sign, a reward
for careful scrutiny.
This bird is an anomaly
on the Ivy River,
too far north and more familiar
with sea marsh or estuary.
An albino great blue perhaps
but exotic in any case
here where the river twines
through old rock.
This day when the radio hawks
war war
the heron pauses on yellow legs
and eyes the shallows
for the sustenance it knows
is there.
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Bathe
Wine-dark steam embrace, flicker-light.
Incense rises, I submerge, rise—waves
of my own hair blind, myrrh-soaked;
a rosemary tress blindfold. Water
takes pain from muscle bruised
black, blood rises, condenses,
trickles to nothing. A foot
on the overflow, to keep
abundance in: add heat
to already pinkening
warmth. I think
about
names,
and soup:
intimate histories
and magical principles,
comfort freely given, received,
chicken rubbed with ginger, garlic,
pepper, lemon after lemon, the whole juice
beaten into eggs until the broth is Mediterranean
sun, the taste a cure for everything. I think about shapes
words make, landscapes of cresting dolphins, oceans of lions,
Nemean and otherwise, swimming the sky. Hunger grows, quietly.
Reading by Beth Adams – Download the MP3
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Fountain
Parque Central, Antigua, Guatemala
(click image to view at larger size)
by Steve Wing
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qarrtsiluni 