Braidings
 
 
When the surf at Laguna Beach recedes,
it leaves a pattern in the sand, long braids
of Xs, a net over the beach that fades
to flatness with the next wave,
and is made again when the ocean draws back,
as if the water is writing itself. 
 
Among bulbs of amber kelp that pop
underfoot, among castaways, fragments
of drift wood, tentacles of seaweeds,
ocean’s excrement, darling detritus
of former generations, now hosts
for a thousand organisms, the dog’s
 
plump paw prints, and my foot prints mix,
withdraw in recessions of bubbling foam.
How we return to waters, how the subject
is in us, the heart’s whoosh and the wave’s,
the tang of saline on lips or tongue,
the Xs of waves’ writing never done.
 
       *               *               *
 
This is the morning of my seventieth year.
It began clearly, without meditation
until I saw the water’s writing on the sand,
and waded out in the surf as far as we dared,
the dog barking at sea birds, then searching
the water for some lost fish it might rescue
 
by dragging it to shore.  Just this past summer
my son and I drifted nine miles down the Platte,
past pelicans on shoals, our boat followed
by antelopes along the sandy bluffs,
and when we noticed other water ways weaving
in and out like trances, and asked their names                                                                                                 
as they were rivers too, the guide said all
were nameless, as they were braids, some
from the Platte, others that joined in—and out,
still others that sprung up and made their journeys,
too many to count or know, their weavings
forming confluences and tail waters
 
where fish gathered, weaving in schools
in currents subtle, and muscular, themselves
plaiting with the fish.  In another summer
I saw the streams of the Cotswolds,
sway with bands of algae, cadmium green,
drifting among swans, in motions perpetual.
 
       *                *                *
 
Later, after our surf-walk, the dog asleep
in the hotel room, I went to the rooftop lounge
of Casa del Camino, where servers, the Laguna girls
with golden braids, seemed to float from table to table,
and thus the music of hair, an almost impossible
music to bear, for what was left of such bodies
 
of brine but traces of salt weavings, outlines,
found in the making of paper and glass,
in mirrors, as if suffering purifies form,
and meanwhile, how our fingers intertwined,
how our nomad bodies curved
into each other, into our braiding selves.

from Selected Poems, FutureCycle Press, 2016