Pier's End
The end of the pier
Is November—
The growing storm
Of leaves moving
In now—
Our hearts are unmasked
As sentries
Where the earth begins
Crumbling to laced reeds
A bare tree maps
The nerves of birds—
Even here
We cannot ride away from the legends—
But a blue light thickens
Curls
Near the upright twigs:
I know it's dusk
*
The road ends at the seawall—
Past love
Dissolves in salt and hollow winds
The eye widens to the long
Casual coastline, foam mosaic
That waver, drift apart
The eye learns love from light
A white expanse of beach
Pure, unmixed as fire
That a fingertip would plunge
Into history
The eye learns love from light
*
If the coins in your pocket
Are faceless
If your fingers shake
Making music
You have a right to search
The shore for a message
A note tossed for years in the shallows
Let the grey water reflect
The straight lines of a city
Hammered up in stone
Each place the heart needs
Is a beach, flat and burning
Under a wash of signals
The body can't accept
*
The body
And its tender money
Will not buy
Everything
But the heart
In a form of
Poverty
Will shape
And paint the figures
Of women
To front dramatic
Ships aimed
At ports
It knows only
As black dots
On a map
*
(for Rosemary)
Water flowing
You drifting by the willows
The city you deserted
A film of fumes still coats
The new buds behind you
This was not innocence—
And there is nothing that hasn't
Used your heart
To delight in tree-swirl
And the perfect veins of leaves
And continue walking: the decision
Is political
But such delight sent you
Far, become a rose robbed
Of scent and color—
Adrift, transparent, out along
The rigid horizon
*
Turning and rising with the waterline's
First light
Gulls juggle the cold air
Above the morning water
Soluble world
Of boulders and a thinning shore
Surprised by sudden small
Waves, a loud
Causeless splashing against the pier
I remember the hesitant
Life of hand and mind
Waking somewhere behind me
*
Testing out words
As if your act could stay
Afloat in the gulls' world
In settling down to think
Have I moved a crucial stone?
Puns sink like rocks—
I want to speak a word
With the multiple meanings
Churned up in the sea-foam
The little random
Bursts out on the surface of the water
A word like
Solution: an answer, and the weight
Of the world dissolving in the sea
The hunger of the sea is a hunger
For words, a mind stranded on a coast
Racing in the dawn-light
*
Morning announces again
The virgin birth of the galaxy
A power that called
To itself to be born
Light streams both up
And down in the open space
Between two clouds
I cup my hands and filter
Seawater through, recoil
From the stink of the kelp
Sand lines the grooves
Of the gravestone names, the circle
Of the graveyard grass is flooded
What will you say in the face of
The sun-star and sea anxious to speak?
In the face of a light both mother and child?
*
You would need a song
A promontory music that new winds
Would blow back in
Maybe
"beauty making beautiful old rime
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights"?
Salt will scrub out the folds in the boulder
You would have to send it into the air:
My inland life is a blur
Of certain faces and gesturing hands
If the sands were the ashes of the dead
You would have to send
That song into the sea or the mystery of
The wave-and-particle light
That will not stop flowing—
Less breakable than a beach
*
Sound-wave
Water-wave
The bending clang
Of the buoy
In the full morning
Piers end in wind
Water, light—
Words have not kept
The seabirds from
Going off into day
The words fade too:
Light on the water
Untimed seashell sounds
All stay
Copyright Credit: Mark Kirschen, "Pier’s End" from Piers End. Copyright © 1980 by Mark Kirschen. Reprinted by permission of Eliot Weinberger.