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1/
Some lazy Saturday try
and trace the origin of driftwood
where surf stitches city to sea,
glass to sand,
myth to oceanography.
Dudes’ boards skim just the surface.
Beneath the churning?
Kelp. Sardines. Fragments
of galleons and Poseidon’s breath.
Bred for caution, dogs chow the shallows.
One jaws a tennis ball, sodden,
recycled from society’s play and racket,
clubby clinking of cocktail glasses
and linking of precious metals.
The ocean owns the unnoticed,
keeps the irretrievable, doesn’t question
commotion, origin of driftwood
and errancy: one degree of change
means landfall or eternity at sea.
2/
Flung jello, waves collapse,
surrender echoes of commingled tongues
and distant shores: their roars
predicted jet planes and wars.
The past clings like salt:
the mind surfaces the Syren’s song,
floats Captain Bligh’s stale breadfruit.
What other treasures does the sea contain?
Salt, silica, iron, entrained air,
unchained molecules. Plankton, lampblack.
Blueglass fishing floats, brownglass
ale bottles, both known to travel
vast distances unaided except for the toast
at sendoff, the oath over loss,
or the simple search for sustenance.
3/
Some don’t seem to mind
the sea’s tanker oil, sewage sludge,
retrieve tennis balls their dogs refuse,
pick at driftwood microscopic with life.
They pluck, sluice,
ladle what meaning they can,
while the sea grows and decomposes,
finally flings a flattened gull down
at the child’s feet, like a grievance.
At times like these we wash our hands
of the sea and pluck the child ashore,
with a violence that will later surprise us.
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