by Jorie Graham
From here, ten to fourteen rows of folding and branching.
Up close, the laving in overlappings that pool sideways as well as suck
back.
Filamentary green-trims where the temporary furthest
coming-forward is lost.
Suctions in three or four different directions back from pinnacle-point. Encounter of backsuck by the foremost,
low-breaking, upstitching really,
arrivals,
where it seems pebblings of sandbits ruffle-up and are ruffled
back into the foam ofthe breakwater browning it.
Glassy mean while the front most arrivals, their sheets filling momentarily with
sky, with clouds fully formed (in which gulls [of sand] glide) even as they all
are drawn back
into the ruffling front-thunder
into which direct backmotion
feeds—is fed—(over which real rows of low-flying pelicans)—
(backmotion into which retreat itself feeds, slides, you’d have to say
dissolves)—
(though strangely nothing of the sea dissolves).
Behind: the crystalline green risings of just-before furling,
then the furling. Between: the wild-carrot lacings and
spume of
breakages the eye hardly caught. Lifting the eyes away one sees
in the near/far distance large upwallings
in which sometimes fish calmly ride sideways
above one,
high above, while close-up, the sky unfolds, deep, here, at our
feet—
(the eyes look down to see up)—(then, squinting, out, to see
the see-through slow uprising
holding its school). The mind doesn’t
want it to break—unease where the heart pushes out—the mind
wants only to keep it coming, yes, sun making the not yet-breaking crest
so gold where the
pelicans turn as they glide—flapping then gliding—
as long as possible without too much dropping—
here and there trying to stay with the just-breaking ridge,
turning towards or away from the
watching-eye
to origami trick, artichoke wing—sheen—crank—beaks dragging the
gold-fringed, gathered garment-furl through which
the fish themselves drive (thread)
the only momentarily unbreaking line. And how there is always something
else. Up close four different brown retreating furls just now (being forced
to forward-break) reentering themselves. Each tripping over each as they are also forced
into retreat.
What is force? My love is forced from me as in retreat
from love. My gaze is forced back into me as it retreats
from thought. Sometimes the whole unraveling activity
for just an instant
pools, all its opposing motions suddenly just pattern on these briefly
lakelike flats—the shore’s upslant unspooling then in only twodimensions—(close your eyes)—
(although it’s only when you open them you hear the seven
kinds of
sound: hiss-flattenings and poolings-out [sand-suctions in the
flat],
the pebbled wordlike pulling down and rolling up, the small
hush of the small first-line of white, it lowering its
voice as it proceeds
to crash, the crash where the larger one behind is hit and hits
the one of yet more force
behind it now, the singleness—(the one loud
thunder-break)—the backmost individual wave,
the lowering and sudden softening of all betweens [of which
every few minutes one] out of which the first crash
yet again can rise. Also the momentary lull: which now lets in
the sound of distance in itself: where your eye might
look up, further out: to where, it seems,
nothing but steady forward progress in its perfect
time occurs: onward, onward: tiny patterns which
seen from above, must: it is imagined: perfectly: shine).
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