The Sea by Day

By day the ocean dreams
through me its vigil scree,
curving and pounding
a salt-white sursurrate
in my veins’ cavalry.
There’s not a waking hour
I fail to hear its foam and hiss
somewhere inside or beyond
the daily metronome
tocking my life away --
as if every facet of the
self I’ve made has a beach
where You wash and pound
and tide this shell of self.
I guess there’s comfort
to know such blue devotions
never cease once they pour
through eye and ear. For
me it happened on a beach
when I was three years old,
my mother’s voice spread
over me like a first milk
while sea-paps fed me the
second in the long song
of the surf, wave by wave
a darker, saltier, wilder cream.
One of those waves surely
ran right past, over and
through: then hauled
me surely back to sea.
Ever since by day I’ve
visibly been boy, then teen,
then man, engaged as all
in life’s hot bouree, while
just offshore of every intent
the rollers bend and rise
to spread their blue wings
of choiring, angel soar.
By day the sea is like the saint
who mediates all night
standing in the sea, counting
each of God’s capping waves
like blue beads of a rosary.
Every waking hour shells
a distant, wetter bliss,
obscured by task and toil
-- Suffice to say I sing today
of that tide which saddles me
and bids me ride from light’s
first to last.

By night?
That’s a different saint, a
stranger, stronger trope
than I have words to assay,
though I’ll try. By night
I stand on the shore and
drowse to that darker sound
as my bones tide through
nocturnal rooms, my dream
a crannog beneath the sea,
an aerie for those angels
who wing cold depths eternally.