Crystal Shores (today)

Again and again I walk
these crystal shores
where you and I
once met and since
and ever dream.
The tide here is swift
and vast and
septiernally one to one
in its scrolling psalter
of wave after wave,
each one curved and curled
with your every latent
lucency, each one
crashing to crystal
smithereens on that
pale sand, erasing
the prints our feet
left behind. I voyage
every day day from this
white chair to that
pale shore where night
hauls back its sheets
revealing the palest of
pale blues around your
ankles, like moon-glazed
wavelets of ice or
the filaments of your eyes
which lit on me and lured
me out to drown the bottom
of all seas. All that remains
today is the music of that
motion at the wild
shore of an ocean
I’ll never see again,
much less walk hand
in hand ensouled with you.
I became the man you
dreamed you saw
that high cathedral night,
a rogue wanderer
no more, by days the
firm husbandman of love,
in early morning matins
a monk writing down
a crystal-seeming sound
on pages that go deeper
and beyonder than
I ever had real balls to go.
Your fantasy became
the phantasm who burned
through all my years
like a torch, leading me
beyond those ghostly
ghastly wastes where
you never to be found
into this shire of wet
surrender where you
are so meltingly afoot,
so fleetingly agleam.
Here the moon of our
imagined history ignites
each massive wave
I ride toward you
& the smashing tumult of
that foam keeps that
heart--or its memory-- alive.
I’m happy to leave you
here with the offshore breeze
flinging your soft hair
& my song secreted
away inside your black
silk selkie’s thunder-
underwear: To shut
the covers of this
bone-white book
and head upstairs
to join my wife in bed,
telling her how much I
love her as I slowly
stroke her feet: And let
the day slowly wash
in through our big windows
to name our married
day where I’m growing older
and have so much work
left to do. That jazzy
blue periphery that you
and I walked once
is the sweet and simple
liturgy I daily ring, like a
crystal angelus. Lauding
each wave’s kiss of
noctilucent noir, adding
it to that one, incessant,
vastly booming choir.