POEM TITLE
To Blackness on the Sea, from an American Who Has Never Been There
POEM
That summer the gulls urged us upward
to the eyepatched windows
of the lighthouse, the blinding
whitewash relieved by red roofs
and bleeding rust.
I, too, live in a community clinging
to its coastline through a mix of limpet obstinance
and gaudy tourism. Mine has moderate
but rainy weather and an annually
shrinking parade in praise of the Pacific
rhododendron. I also feel oblivion
nipping at my heels. This era
of wide knowledge makes small
villages smaller and small poets,
minuscule. The world is on fire, so who cares
whether one more local kitchen, crowded
with the flotsam of town history, survives another year?
All our favorite bits of the map are curling up
at the edges, pointlessly pulling
skirts back from the flame. The whole
library is coming down in ash. Why bother
about verses in honor of a mouse,
a red wheelbarrow, a lobster pot?
My sister wants to plant native
milkweed by the creek to coax
back monarchs. I tell her I remember
a swarm overwhelming the playground
fence, wings fluttering like a thousand
prayers laid open. She is only four years younger,
but she’s never seen such abundance.
The age of monuments has ended,
but we still want to live beyond our lives,
to greet upcoming generations
like the mass of Blackness Castle,
“the ship that never set sail”—stern pointing into the sea,
glory run aground a long time ago:
a grand boast, a prison, a landmark, a warning.
My sister is an artist
too sick to work, but each day
she fills a square on her calendar,
a tiny canvas. Maybe more than fame,
we want our days to matter,
we want to encase our people,
our places, in amber.
I would save the Lobster Pot
and Blackness on the Sea. I would save
my sister. I would save Point Wilson Lighthouse.
I would save that hike with Heather, our windswept laughs
purpling the broad moor of following winters.
But preserving any piece of earth, however dear,
seems a task beyond poetry.
Love is only a pebble tossed off a cliff.
Yet every wide-ranging ripple starts
with the muted splash, the localized 'o' of awe.