We park beside the lighthouse keeper’s lawn.
A hummingbird is unbalancing hibiscus plant life;
a nuthatch, tidying up the trunks of bushes.
I didn’t know its title the closing time we had been right here.
What else did I now not know? What else has came about?
This can be a position we don’t appear to thoughts returning to
after the canine, with out him, perhaps as a result of
it seems like time made walkable. The fins of gneiss,
upright like vinyl in a bin, trip down
the promontory in parallel, in corporate,
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 masking slaps, uncovering hiss.
What number of years has it been since we had been right here?
What number of summers, which must be spaced aside in reminiscence
by means of winters, like mica planes by means of quartz, however aren’t?
The way in which we’ve divvied up remembering, it’s you
who is aware of dates, and I, just like the overdue canine,
have higher good fortune with hows. With which ridge right here
leads over the crown kind of safely, as an example,
to the sideways mille-feuille of fashion designer’s curves, the serried shark’s tooth,
the organ pedals of stone that run into the ocean.
We clamber, wobble, resteady. You scrape a gentle shin.
The others right here, directly, I feel, selfie
early, however we, previous marrieds, additionally now not too just right
for public individuation, additionally
dwelling a commonplace factor, mission additional down
the slope to the place white granite crosses in.
Just like the fill-in flesh of scar. “I really like your scars,” you swore
the opposite day. “However they’re now not me!” I shouted.
Two cameras in the past, I photographed the grainless
rock intruding into grained, however now not
as of late. One takes an image when one can’t come again.
To Paris, formative years. However us in entrance of rocks
that blow their own horns trade that doesn’t trade in human lifetimes?
“It doesn’t subject,” I stated one evening. I supposed
our seek advice from to geology. “Now not even us?”
you requested, now not which means you and me, precisely,
I feel, however one thing in between that won’t closing,
that issues to us extra as it gained’t.
Ahead of 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 global.
As a result of we occur to be right here, we see the water’s
readability and attractiveness, pointlessly,
the giving component that washes rock away.