Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Inner passage

Over the lip of this cliff
the bones of stones
push half-broken
into setting sunlight

I can see breakers
not so much a colour
as a quality of light
brighter
against the dimming shore
thin as a diamond-scored line
on the hinge
of the moment
between two worlds

The waves curl
into the lap
of the rocky beach below
and fall back
each
overrun by the next
each
a point
crowding
an infinite line

Somewhere
above and behind me
a herring gull screams
then flies out
over the edge
toward Japan

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bones of stones...

coyote said...

Yes, well. I have pawed into bone beds at the bases of one or two bison jumps in my time. After 6 000-plus years, the half-fossilized artifacts one finds there are not good eating anymore.

More importantly, they are eroded to reveal an interior structure which resembles that of a sponge, except that the lattice is hard.

Finally, what I'm on about: the action of a couple of aeons' worth of seawater wears certain varieties of exposed bedrock on the west coast of this continent into something wierdly similar, although on a much grander scale. I could think of nothing else but earth's bones when I saw it.