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I.
In shifting winds
The only steady force
Was change in me.
II.
I was of four minds,
One was a stairway down into the dark,
And two were others' hearts.
III.
Driving on packed sand near the tideline
With my windows rolled down,
First brush with the sea
After 500 miles from cold mountains,
An eagle drops out of the wind,
Hooked yellow beak framed in my door,
Snatches a willet from the edge of the surf.
The Atlantic roars with indifference.
IV.
I do not know which to prefer,
The thrill of inflections
Or the thrill of innuendos,
The eagle screaming,
Or just after.
V.
Three bronzed hipsters with white pony tails
Scavenged the beach in short strides,
One used a staff he'd peeled with his penknife,
One carried a board he'd found for his deck,
One studied the sea for the spouts of humpbacks,
All loved their wives where they'd left them.
VI.
Ninety-five per cent of the ocean
Remains unseen by humankind.
We know little more of each other.
VII.
Three thousand years
After Homer wrote "the wine-dark sea,"
It remains in human parlance,
But never have I seen gray-green pinot noir.
Perhaps something more was intended.
VIII.
Leave it to an Irishman:
James Joyce sniffed at
“The snotgreen sea.”
IX.
Here comes another Safari Tour down the beach,
A 4WD pickup painted desert camo with chairs in the bed
For bundled tourists of an age looking cold in the wind,
Come to aim their phones at wild horses
Without driving their Lincolns on sand,
Down-encased flesh, shoulder-to-shoulder,
Jostling over the gritty drifts.
The horses, descended from Spanish shipwrecks,
Graze on dune grass without lifting their heads,
Furred like bears, adapted, and as ordinary to locals
As big rabbits in the yard.
X.
When the eagle flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of many circles.
XI.
Give me the rougher months
When the sea is up and terrifying,
When gales shake the house on its pilings,
When the surf is a thousand-foot churn
That threatens what's left of the dunes,
And I am alone with my grief,
Knowing I should have done more.
XII.
The tide is running out
After setting things right;
With a turn to the west,
Wind shears the waves.
The soul is a kite without strings.
XIII.
Nothing's enough
After the loss of a child.
The sea is too vast, I once thought,
To ever succumb to the waste of our kind;
Most of us know better now,
With an island of plastic bigger than Texas
Perning in the North Pacific Gyre,
As SpaceX seeks another world to ruin.
XIV.
Everything’s once.
We should have done more.
The ocean is mortal.
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—after, and with two stanzas adapted from,
Wallace Steven's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
