Third revision
I.
Morning comes like tiger stripes
to flap upon the swells
like gulls that pull invisible sails
across the agate cloud
as morning shows compassion
and the sea on pewter kindness
serves beads of sun like runny eggs
and a distant grapefruit shining
with a joyous cherry top.
Where phantom fins in weedy skeins
rope through the tinsel sheen
as if on mystery feeding.
The sea protects its fishes,
makes every gleam of sun seem jumping life
to shimmer in mid-air like rising stars
as if this heaven isn't really there.
Then the ocean lightens
from cloud openings of blue, to express,
without meaning to, something of the secret
Of these restless peaks, that drive
like ordered armies, how they
send out tribal lines as one
long irritation of current
Across the deep blue monochrome
forever torn by white and wrinkled black
like slackened fabric pulled forever tight.
II.
The waves smooth out by afternoon
from sunlight's white steam iron,
rough wool brushed to burnished pearl
that swirls with impossibility,
That the water never stops its churn
in honor of our mind
listing in the golden light, side to side.
But the blue sky lets the blue sea
darken back to mystery:
it's but the play on water brows of light
that makes us speculate there's something there;
It could be veins of coal,
obsidian sun sharpened
for all we know, as we move along alone.
From our pirate masque we call the clouds
macabre across the Baja,
and in between the thing we call the void,
a kind of mirror on the unseen.
All the ocean has of us
is that light shining back
as a momentary hope.
III.
The blue grows bolder as it slips
across the dying sun, become a dish,
a dome, a hover of aurora
before her last light twinkles above water
And sky spreads hues of purple-rose
and peach-skin lavender
while the sea below stays blue and undisturbed
save its endless agitation
as it drifts to neither yield nor connect
just persist, overcoming
what no longer has a bearing or a path.
We cross what has no voice
or face, just sound and sight bereft
just like our longing
to form the plastic ocean
in the yoke strap of the human
seeking purpose, finding meaning
in emotion come like beads of moon off of the swells
that, though impossible to know, we intone
a kind of prayer to, of actual accord,
to the hidden lace imprisoned
by the disappearing self.
Man-made lamp on inky whirl,
fish scales rise against the spiral,
all we want imposed on ocean
as imposture;
All the implications are a circle
banging round our brains
as all we have.
IV.
No succor, just transcendence;
brain strands pulse in milky plumes,
continually collide
without consequence,
Just shears of sea expressing,
as the weight bears languidly away,
rainbow spray from white-capped frosting.
A rolling boil of blue, adjusting,
sends would-be shapes back to the void,
all the unborn shores and fields and mountains
for us, it seems, to know
In the moment they are gone:
the blue translucent dunes,
the bolts of sapphire sun.
Smoke appears along the sea
like a Portuguese Man-o-War
and the waves dissolve in nebulous mist
that hits the deck like tea-kettle steam
Releasing every vision back to white,
which clears to fresh nothingness, born-again sea
as a dolphin breaks the plane
to children squealing.
