Impressions of Decadent Sea

Morning comes like tiger stripes
     to flap upon the swells
Like gulls that pull invisible sails
             across the agate tinsel,
As the sea's kind pewter serves up 
     beads of sun like runny eggs
And distant grapefruit shining
             topped with Maraschino cherry.

From our pirate masque we call the clouds
     macabre along the Baja,
As the rolling boil of blue sends would-be shapes
              to the unseen:
The blue translucent dunes, the bolts of sun obsidian,
     all the unborn shores and fields to know
In the moment they are gone, and in between,
              the thing we call the void.

But the sea protects its fishes, makes every gleam

      of sun seem jumping life

As phantom fins rope weedy skeins
             as if on mystery feeding,

Yet a dolphin breaks the plane 
      to children squealing

And rainbow spray bears languidly away

             from white-capped frosting.

   
Still something deep resists, as peaks drive restless tribal lines 
       in long irritations of current

To neither yield nor connect, just collide 

             continually, without consequence,

Sheared off plumes of sea that express

      the milk of impossibility,

Forever torn by white and wrinkled black
             like slackened fabric pulled back tight.
     
The waves smooth out by afternoon
     from the white steam iron of sun,
Wool brushed to burnished pearl
             that swirls, and lists in golden light, as

Smoke like a Portuguese Man-of-War appears,
      waves nebulize in mist that hits the deck
Like teapot fog, releasing every vision back

              to fresh white nothingness, born-again sea.

The blue grows bolder as it slips the dying sun

     and its peach-skin purple implications,

Whose circle bangs around our brains 'til

               fish scales rise against the spiral

Of man-made lamps on the inky whirl, where
     we impose what we want on the ocean,
Still churning in this final wilderness
               in search of the familiar.