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| Andrew Wyeth, "Starfish" |
On
the Island
After
a night of wind we are surprised
by
the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea
and
leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore
this
way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass
among
the low whittled bushes, listening
to
crickets, to the whisk of the small waves,
the
rattling back of stones. “Observation,”
our
Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science.
Look
all around you. Some beaches
may
be quite barren except for things washed up.”
A
buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb
cloudy
but unbroken. For an hour
my
daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck.
She
sings the song she’s just invented:
Everybody
knows when the old days come.
Although
it is October, today falls into the shape
of
summer, that sense of languid promise
in
which we are offered another
and
then another spell of flawless weather.
It
is the weather of Sundays,
the
weather of memory, and I can see
myself
sitting on a porch looking
out
at water, the discreet shores
of
a lake. Three or four white pines
were
enough of a mystery, how they shook
and
whispered, how at night I felt them
leaning
against my window, like the beginning
of
a story in which children must walk
deeper
and deeper into a dark forest,
and
are afraid, yet calm, unaware
of
the arrangements made for them to survive.
My
daughter counts her shells and stones,
my
wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise
an
old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky
to
the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they
fold
around rocks humped up out of the sea.
I
can turn the wheel and blur it all
into
a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light.
“A
steady push of wind,” we read in the book,
“gives
water its rolling, rising and falling motion.
As
the sea moves up and down, the wave itself
moves
forward. As it nears the shore friction
from
the bottom causes it to rise higher
until
it tips forward in an arc and breaks.”
On
the table in front of the house
is
the day’s collection: sea-glass
and
starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle—
some
to be taken home, arranged in a box,
laid
on a shelf, later rediscovered, later
thrown
away, casually, without regret,
and
some of it, even now, to be discarded,
like
the lesser stones, and the pale
chipped
shells which are so alike
we
can agree that saving one or two will be enough.
Lawrence
Raab
“The weather
of memory”. This is a poem of reflection, of looking forward, looking back,
saving and discarding, life moments coming and going like waves washing in and
out… The writing seems easy and
effortless, but the more times I read it, the more art I find. “Observation”.
Yes, exactly. Observing the poem. Maybe the poem also is, for us, something to
be found and collected together with others, taken home – certainly I am
arranging them here, on a kind of shelf. Poems like reminders of thoughts, of
days, poems to be treasured and displayed. That is my goal for this blog, I
would say.( But one or two are not enough.)
