Ebb

Year round, year round, we’ll ride

this treadmill whose frayed tide

fretted with mud,

leaves our suburban shoreline littered

with rainbow muck, the afterbirth

of industry, past scurf-

streaked bungalows

and pioneer factory;

but, blessedly, it narrows

through a dark aisle

of fountaining, gold coconuts, an oasis

marked for the yellow Caterpillar tractor.

We’ll watch this shovelled too, but as we file

through its swift-wickered shade there always is

some island schooner netted in its weave

like a lamed heron

an oil-crippled gull;

a few more yards upshore

and it heaves free,

it races the horizon

with us, railed to one law,

ruled, like the washed-up moon

to circle her lost zone,

her radiance thinned.

The palm fronds signal wildly in the wind,

but we are bound elsewhere,

from the last sacred wood.

The schooner’s out too far,

too far that boyhood.

Sometimes I turn to see

the schooner, crippled, try to tread the air,

the moon break in sere sail,

but without envy.

For safety, each sunfall,

the wildest of us all

mortgages life to fear.

And why not? From this car

there’s terror enough in the habitual,

miracle enough in the familiar. Sure …