The Sea and The Sky

There are differences always;
The language is intimate and stands,
A symptom of things gone before,
Retreating through its limitations.

The town of a second birth,
Its enclosed silences,
Swollen with growth and alteration,
An expansion provoked by the end of land.

One artificial limb stretches mutely
Above the tidal leanings,
Indicating the lines of a boundary,
Where a culture concludes its acceptance

With this familiar shore, its ancestral
Indentations, its character of stone,
Where we agree to speak of differences,
To look back, or else walk on.

Remaining occupied in discussion
Teaches that whatever the day lacks
Can be replaced, though we are grounded
At a shared table, a self, aged by years,
Is claiming its own habits, and asserting

Preserved arguments, somewhere distant,
Or as close and perceivable as in the next room,
Plotting a synopsis for footsteps unconcerned
By realism, fixed with its own motives,
in the spaces between the exploited and unused.

We laugh as though the future were a simple enterprise;
Tossing it between ourselves, stretching its patterns
Across expected corridors, meeting half way
On stairways, or fulfilling agreed contracts, that our separate
Selves should cross someday, changed and unchanged.

Finally, our distances will give themselves
To measurement, in taking up the enquiry
I am certain I will begin, as others have,
And end, my palm weighted with approximates;
There is, we have gathered, only one certainty.

Things you have secreted in the word ‘I’,
All private fictions, will be open for speculation,
There will be evenings when an opportunity
To substitute this set of complexities, for the ordinariness
Of any object, fixed in a stagnant pool of light,

May strike you as inviting, to sleep and wake
Via a switch, purposeful, pragmatic,
Perhaps most essentially, inanimate;
Leaving another, looking remarkably like you,
Considering the distances of which we become composed.

A million eyes may be given the same stimulus, but this is uniformity and not unity.

Beginning cautiously near the border territory,
Summing up its origins, the rains come quickly,
Interrogating the terrain, its jurisdiction of influence;
Two countries, indistinguishable at their shared seam.

Westward course scheduled on the slick road,
Tight to the hillside, a window’s outlook held briefly,
The car’s speed allowing a half recognition,
Untranslatable, familiar by significance if not by sight. 

The signs conclude with an arrival, an understanding,
Where the land terminates through valley and field,
Marked by a serpentine line into memory,
Its trails sounding with expectations unfulfilled.

Slipping anonymous and unnoticed through
Its preserved heart, the soil whose language failed,
Whose prospects were relinquished, I remember
What was given; I ask my questions to the rain.