My stride was two to my father's by the sea, back arching into its green voice whose final words whisper on white foam lips. Weathered cubes in clapboard variations perched along the seawall. He spoke of St. Paul or Kepler, of hammer beams, or corbels, footing stones, a search for structure to resist all tides while the small sandpiper feet of my voice scurried to feed along the edge of his. We ended at the cairn of sea-slapped rock streaming khaki, kelp ribbons where we filled my pail, his boots with mussels. We steamed their flesh orange within the shields of nacre, luminous against blue rims - a spoon of moon on midnight's ocean. In my constructions - struts of syntax, meter's well-spaced joists - words come back, a childhood language now tattered in the undertow of his death, vocabulary of thought which, like weathered cubes on a seawall, promise refuge, as though sounds were stones, as if steel structure could endure the earth's tectonics. Words or sand a frail shield, a child's hand held up before her face to hide from a parent's slap. An autumn breath blew froth from crests of waves, chilling marrow to iron rods in my arms and legs. I rode white mares of water but was no rival for a lone seal sliding beyond arms' reach within surge, master of the arch of element. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AGAINST THEM WHO LAY UNCHASTITY TO THE SEX OF WOMAN by WILLIAM HABINGTON ON KEATS, WHO DESIRED THAT ON HIS TOMB SHOULD BE INSCRIBED: by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY THE OLD BUFFALO TRAIL by ISABEL ANDERSON CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS by JOANNA BAILLIE POLYHYMNIA: DEDICATION TO THE COUNTESS OF LINDSEY by WILLIAM BASSE |