shore

Dear Waves,You have been restless all your life? Or maybe uneasy? I don't know quite. Oscillating between faiths, swinging between shores!Yet when we sit next to you on those sands, do you never feel like sharing what bothers you so much?

Let my toes teach the shore how to feel a tranquil lifethrough the wetness of sands Let my heart latch the doorof blackness, as all my pain now blue sky understands

In a sea of strangers,you've longed to know me.Your life spent sailingto my shores.

You don__ need to be the tide to rise and fall, you don__ have to be a wave to touch the shore; just be a little sand-grain and feel them all

So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don__ dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious.I left him by the water__ edge,still waving long after the ship was goneand if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn__ have heard for I__e said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I__e taught them well. There__ a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew. I used to go there to say goodbye. I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them, one way or the other,leaving sin on my body scrubbing tears off with saltand I built my rituals in farewells. Endings I still cling to. So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my headand though he said he__ come back one day I know a broken promise from a right onefor I have used them myself and there is no coming back.Minds like ours are can__ be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.I turned away from the oceanas not to fall for its pleafor it used to seduce and consume meand there was this one nighta few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewellsand just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.But I was younger then and easily fooledand the ocean was deep and dark and blueand I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.Then days passed by and I spent them with my work and now I__ writing letters I will never dare to send.But there is this one day every year or sowhen the burden gets too heavyand I collect my belongings I no longer needand make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anewand it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written wordsand I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they__e all gone. Nothing left to hold me back.You kissed me that morning as if you__ never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains wrapped around my veins,and if you see a fire from the shore tonightit__ my chains going up in flames. The time of moon i quite glorious. We could have been so glorious.

In the Bay, whenever I got depressed, I always drove out to the Ocean Beach. Just to sit. And, I don't know, something about looking at water, how it just goes and goes and goes, something about that I found very soothing. As if somehow I were connected to every ripple that was sending itself out and out until it reached another shore.

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting __ver and over announcing your placein the family of things.

White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North")

True love is the tide that pulls out to sea, but always returns to kiss the shore at sunrise.

Had I told the seaWhat I felt for you,It would have left its shores,Its shells,Its fish,And followed me.