Winter at Red Rock, Hoylake.

Winter at Red Rock, Hoylake.

(Et ego in Arcadia vixi)

With all my years gone seaward on the tide,

I come to final terms with a salt kingdom.

Here, where the wheel of the revolving sea

Repeats, repeats, evolving in its gyre

Primeval whorls and weeds strewing wet sand,

Beating to windward, half-starved seagulls flee

The westering sun that sears cold stone with fire

As white-fanged combers lumber to the land.

Dead water sullen round a silent shore,

The moon a hulk adrift in a black sky,

The ebb tide racing past a treeless island;

Or else the wind-lashed ocean’s crazed uproar,

A burning crescent, cloud-rack streaming by,

The sea’s brute bellow bruited far inland.

Interpret now the idiom of the wave,

Tongues of the drowned speech of antiquity,

Patois of pebbles, idiot idiolects,

Vernaculars of bearded mouths that rave –

Interminable, feral oratory! –

In unintelligible dialects.

It is an uncouth speech, grown hoarse with time,

Uttering like primal Genesis, ‘Destroy!

Create! Let light and life come forth!’

What mind, crept forth from Cambrian sea slime,

Burns like the sea-swept flame upon that buoy

Riding the night storm howling from the north?

What purpose to mad discourse of the sea?

What purport in wild parlance of the wave?

This leaking skiff, weathering the western flow,

Is battered by breakers. Who shall see

Them swallow me, wide-eyed? In its sea-grave

Day founders, dying. Now and always now

Night whelms on us. The salt flood that we are

Sweeps us forever seaward, past the bar,

Assails the buoy where flickering fire rides.

Sea surges shake these ancient, crumbling walls:

Lost in the dusk, some storm-tossed seabird calls

Across the mutter of these darkling tides.

Feb. 4, 2002.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM