i
The hand with a seagull purpose falls upon
Sand where the beach is barren: through clean light
From eye’s blue zenith, past seascapes of blue,
Falls on grey sand; yet stenciled in its fall
Against a band of ocean flaked with sunlight:
Touches at last the sand, as one descending
The spiral staircase of association
Around the well of substance. The dry sand crumbles.
A leanness in the atmosphere prevails,
Euclidean monotony of bone,
Music and chill perspective of the shore
Where nothing blurs unless it is the eye.
The beach extends, peopled with solitudes:
Dune-grass, dead starfish brownish with red navels,
Glass changed from ornament to element
In oval lumps, weed, wood and skeletons
Of beach umbrellas. And with the nimble wrist
Buried in sand, palm and its curling fingers
Protrude remote as breathers of the sea,
As sea’s accumulations shored and salted.
ii
At noon the swimmers pink and shining sprint
Across the beach in the green shallows sporting,
Explore the miniature monsters of the reef
And plunge beyond cold fathoms in the sea.
A while they float, eyes lidded in the sun;
Then play at drowning, smilingly submerge,
Describe in strings of light impossible curves,
Wrist, throat, and ankle clothed in a green cold;
The sunlight, submarine, entangles them,
Fearlessly sunken from the lilting ceiling,
As in a trail of bubbles they withdraw
Deeper to where upon invisible floors
The coldest darkness sprouts. They touch clam-shells
Perhaps, or tangled plants or a blind stone,
Then plummet upwards, leap half out of the sea
To greet with waterfall eyes the gentle air;
And swim to shore, trampling on wind and waves,
And gaze upon the surface of the sea,
And turning, wring the water from their hair
And rub the cold from their cold eyes and bodies.
iii
We watch the skeletons of childhood sunken
In sockets of the beach, oyster-white stone,
Bone, shell, sophistications of nostalgia,
A music as of time on the victrola.
Composed among misfortunes of smooth bone
A pearled illusion in the ear creates
Familiar madrigals like those of sleep,
Builds these organic trophies. So coral builds
Its chamber music in the skull; the ear
More labyrinthine than the coiling shell
Will echo it. The pebbled eye propelled
By the elastic rhythms of the tide,
The hand that falls to quiet each swelling wave
Are ambered in a cone of time. But children
Barefoot with baskets holding starfish come
To skim the flat stones, stare at cloudlessness;
And a gull carousing in angelic weather
Prints with its image white cascading octaves
Mounting beyond perception; and the sky
Is vibrant and the sea again unsounded.
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