Hossegor

Surfing probably didn’t occur to the Vikings

   but then you never know—maybe one of Asgeir’s men

      found himself oaring his chieftain’s faering

for this Biscay shore, just as a set wave jacked—

   the kind that narrows the eyes of the guns

      who yearly light up the Quicksilver Pro

(Slater, Fanning, Medina, Florence, Parko)—

   and intuiting to lean down the face of the monster

      felt it take, the shove as the hull slotted flush

into the vein of the sea god, frisson pitching through

   the crew like the shudder of a brained seal

      as they fluked the drop on an outside bomb.

You can almost see them now, rolling in from

   out the back like hoons on a banana boat,

      on course to plow through locals. A nerf howls

to a thud; a kitesurfer eats it. And there must

   have been some among the numberless wrecked

      who happened to cling to jetsam felicitously warped—

the waterlogged panel of a walnut armoire, say—

   as to hitch them a lift in the home stretch

      of this crumbling A-frame’s deep Atlantic fetch.

Perhaps one of them even cottoned on

   that after breathing, the art lies in the reading

      of the break, getting to grips with tide-shift

and how the wind’s caprice vexes the takeoff,

   the fickle line-up—but who among them

      could have envisaged a Tahitian king, carving?

The guns will return, who are now braving

   the skull-crushing torque of Teahupo’o.

Jaya Savige