April 19

Falling into redundancies now, a cord whipped back. A long run up to Diamond Ridge along the beach, plus tide, alluvion alone, no packed sand, no firm footing, but sun & a brief window of blue shot through the haloes of cloud. Talked to Willa the whole way, or the air, or the cliffs layered in ochre & burnt sienna, shale & sand, to the stone & pebble shifting underfoot, the runnels of breakup streams spilling dun over the cliff-tops in cut ravine & culvert. The finer points of a self-examination in which no self would stand in steadfast at the close, in which answer’s liquefaction is nearly immediate, a foothold cleft from sand. I would have no answer, bride no certainty, grapple not after wrested fact. I would wrestle instead a shadow & know the bout endless until its end. Toss anchor to tug at tow & undertow, tide & riven wave. no sea-bed, no ample weight to hold. What self would come of self’s ceaseless battery? Self-inquisitor, playing at self’s endgame. So a gull falls upon a stone that shoulders out of the shallow water. So a log washes ashore drawn loose from a mirrored beach in Portugal. So the wind blows or the clouds part or the sun shines. & then, chalk fail-grasping a blackboard, it fades, a dust limning its base. Tomorrow comes. These words we scrawl in desperate hope, these naked gouges in white bark, crude initials, they, too, come to falter & burn. This whale-blue gley, this silt lodged beneath my every footfall, coined a shaded ebony in buried ash, a cliff eroded & dragged leagues from its place of origin, time the dragging leviathan. Say the red cliffs of Aquinah, where we knew a love unravaged yet by time & tide. Where we passed in walking the shoreline the naked man reading Keats, & nothing else for miles. Say the bluffs opening from the Skunk Cabbage trail, where a family of elk bedded down upon the trod grass, cloven prints of two calves tiny hieroglyphs trailing in the sand, the buck alert & watching, its eyes almond-brown & piercing. Say the channel at Galilee, the sand-arm of the Cape, the labyrinth of crag & cliff playing limn to Bar Harbor. The places we inhabit crumble under wave-heft & are pulled from us without hope of remedy. Where then to place a step, where to tread that might hold?

I am pleased I came here. This world a wilderness entire. I find myself divested, time & again, of myself. Hush, then, matins, & let quiet too the daily vespertine call-note that would sound. It is enough to merely be. Here, as I write it, the steller jay alighting beneath the spruce, the man whose name it bears credited with Bering in the discovery of even where I sit. Choking on dust, a song to yet endure.