We park beside the lighthouse keeper’s backyard.
A hummingbird is unbalancing hibiscus flowers;
a nuthatch, tidying up the trunks of timber.
I didn’t know its identify the final time we have been right here.
What else did I not know? What else has occurred?
This can be a place we don’t appear to thoughts returning to
after the canine, with out him, perhaps as a result of
it seems to be like time made walkable. The fins of gneiss,
upright like vinyl in a bin, experience down
the promontory in parallel, in firm,
in step the way in which one all the time is in time
and differing the way in which one all the time does in time,
till the sides, gentled however ungiving,
march into, and beneath, the overlaying slaps, uncovering hiss.
What number of years has it been since we have been right here?
What number of summers, which ought to be spaced aside in reminiscence
by winters, like mica planes by quartz, however aren’t?
The best way we’ve divvied up remembering, it’s you
who is aware of dates, and I, just like the late canine,
have higher luck with hows. With which ridge right here
leads over the crown kind of safely, as an example,
to the sideways mille-feuille of dressmaker’s curves, the serried shark’s enamel,
the organ pedals of stone that run into the ocean.
We clamber, wobble, resteady. You scrape a fragile shin.
The others right here, straight, I believe, selfie
early, however we, outdated marrieds, additionally not too good
for public individuation, additionally
dwelling a typical factor, enterprise additional down
the slope to the place white granite crosses in.
Just like the fill-in flesh of scar. “I like your scars,” you swore
the opposite day. “However they’re not me!” I shouted.
Two cameras in the past, I photographed the grainless
rock intruding into grained, however not
at present. One takes an image when one can’t come again.
To Paris, youth. However us in entrance of rocks
that showcase change that doesn’t change in human lifetimes?
“It doesn’t matter,” I mentioned one evening. I meant
our go to to geology. “Not even us?”
you requested, not that means you and me, precisely,
I believe, however one thing in between that won’t final,
that issues to us extra as a result of it received’t.
Earlier than the boulders on the finish, the crashed-upon,
we discover a dimple that has stored some sea,
a double handful: kelp and ticklish hermit crabs
and limpets in a short lived world.
As a result of we occur to be right here, we see the water’s
readability and sweetness, pointlessly,
the giving factor that washes rock away.
