Blank Slate

March 24 2017

The tide re-arranged the rocks

as I slept.

The view

if I stood just so

was gone.

The power of water.

Found art

and beauty's transience.

But I love the wash of surf

as it retreats.

Wave after wave

lapping, draining,

leaving smooth sand, sloping down

glistening wet.

Small trails of froth

deffervescing,

stranded objects

discarded, or dead

scattered about.

The waves arrive

not quite clockwork.

A pause, as if trifling with me,

then a volley

of two or three.

And some are strong, some weak,

like the fitful breathing

of a pent-up sea.

Just as the heart

is never quite regular,

water

the same salt as blood.

The tide ebbs, the beach lengthens.

And the sand is re-arranged,

stirred-up from beneath

or washing out to sea

or shifting

to the lee of the hook.

So in a thousand years

it will migrate down the shore,

leaving a granite shelf

coarse gravel.

But still, for now

the same hard-pan surface,

the familiar beach

that seems eternal.

My footsteps

heading down to the rocks

do not last long,

water

seeping up from beneath

sides slumping inward.

Impressions

the rising tide will smooth away.

Each day

a blank slate

beginning as it ends.

A meditation on time: cycles within cycles; recurrence vs progress; transience, illusions of permanence, beginnings and ends.

It's also a poem of close observation and microcosm, and plays with magnitude and scale. I like the telling detail that close observation and microcosm invite. But a poem isn't a novel, and the pleasure in the writing is cultivating an ear for getting just the right balance between too little and too much.

The New Yorker this week (March 27 2017) had an article (by staff writer Joshua Rothman) about Daniel Dennett, a philosopher – and an absolutely fascinating character -- who studies consciousness (a favourite topic of mine!) But the poem has nothing to do with that subject. Rather, it simply began with a phrase from the final paragraph that caught my attention, and made me want to riff. Here it is:

Before the morning slipped away, Dennett decided to go out for a walk, down to where the lawn ended and a rocky beach began. He’d long delighted in a particular rock formation, where a few stones were piled just so, creating a peephole. He was disappointed to find that the tides had rearranged the stones, and that the hole had disappeared. The dock was pulled ashore for the winter, its parts stacked next to his sailboat. He walked down the steps anyway, occasionally leaning on his walking stick. For a few minutes, he stood at the bottom, savouring the frigid air, the lapping water, the dazzling sun. ♦