The Sun At Sea (2004)

Easter Sunday, 2004

There is a God (some say),
A deep,but dazzling darkness.
— Henry Vaughan

All night the great sun
walks beneath the wave,
his heat and brilliance
a riptide in the dark
we dream as the sea.
My crannog is his shape
below, one page of
his transit; as ink on
paper his step in abyss.
The poem reflects his
form of light in obverse,
a shade the great depth
shadows. Such mind
by nature is the music
of salt menses, the three
steps inside which precedes
every waking rouse.
My vigil is defined
by the last of each night,
still and hushed, the
dark not so much about
as pressing heavily down
with every oppression
of Time. I write on his
crannog as he passes
below, my hand his stride
as he moves full circle
to the same brightening
hour. Singing as such is
in the service of paired
numens, sun and sea in
bed nose to tide, heat
of the heart coiled in
the dark of the mind,
an angelus of sky arch
making love to dark soak.
Last night I drowsed
deep from the day’s
exhausting work cutting
back the azaleas and a
long trunk of the camphor
tree which swarms our
back yard. My skin hot
with the sun which blared
bright all day in cloudless
skies. My sleep was some
hiss of that sun under
sea, the elements confirming
both love and poetry
through each other in
plunging obliquity. My
wife next to me arcing
on the moon over the
earth in that sea shared
with stars and a Gulf
Stream of high winds.
We’ll meet at first light
to wake our shared day,
our bodies lifting and
dipping the source, spinning
in ways we will never
fully surmise, at work
again, our hearts nailed
together in the next
Easter sunrise.