by James Dickey
You sit here on solid banks trying to figure
What the difference is when you see
The sun and at the same time see the ocean
Has no choice: none, but to advance more or less
as it does:
waves
Which were, a moment ago, actual
Bodiless sounds that could have been airborne,
Now bring you nothing but face-off
After face-off, with only gravitational sprawls
Laid in amongst them. To those crests
Dying hard, you have nothing to say:
you cannot help it
If you emerge; it is not your fault. You show: you stare
Into the cancelling gullies, saved only by dreaming a future
Of walking forward, in which you can always go flat
Flat down where the shadows have fallen
Clear: where water is shucked of all wave-law:
Lies running: runs
In skylight, gradually cleaning, and you gaze straight into
The whole trembling forehead of yourself
Under you, and at your feet find your body
No different from cloud, among the other
See-through images, as you are flawingly
Thought of,
but purely, somewhere,
Somewhere in all thought.
