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Tuesday 25 August 2009

In Water World


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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Rain_ot_ocean_beach.jpg

Distant rain, Ocean Beach, San Francisco
: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2006



The sea repeats itself in dreams, a green-grey world of water
Calm boats frozen in shade
Pale blank clouds, pines, rocks and kelp shrouds
Like woolly fish in mist pink distance floating
The beach stretches as far as the sand bar
Clean detached waves wash over dry stone, tears of rain drift
The water is perfectly still, restructuring everything




6 comments:

Phanero Noemikon said...

shades of Boecklin, of everything grand!!

magnificent, TC..

one of my favorite lines
i think, ever!
very cool.

Creatures from the great star rebus haunt and run

Pinkerbell said...

I can feel the movement of the waves in this TC. I like the way you repeat part of the line about the sea repeating itself but end it with words repeated from elsewhere. This suggests the repeated movement, but reflects that it's a different wave entirely which laps where the last had once been.

TC said...

Thank you my lovelies for catching up with this one.

(By the way, activating the Mickey Mouse finger with a click will yield the rest of the beach rebus...)

TC said...

(Make that the lower beach rebus... it's been one of those days of variable image weather, pictures drifting...)

Dale said...

The poem is great: thanks. And this line, spectacular (!):

"Clean detached waves wash over dry small stones"

The 6 stressed vowels form a kind of mimetic wave action....

Love,

Dale

TC said...

Dale,

Thanks. I wanted a slow line there, the elongation of the vowels, and a sense of the water washing over the stones and back again--"the repeated movement" as Pinkerbell says above.

Your comments as well as Lanny's have helped me see certain things in this one that I'd missed before; in the making of it the poem felt to be coming less from intention than from that sort of "dictation" that seems to take place when for better or worse your poems get impatient with the plans you had for them and just do what they will do.