Port Townsend Poem

This is a new poem I began during my creative residency last Fall in Port Townsend, WA. Think I'm ready to craft it into something, or at least try. Check back often for progress!
original impulse
deletion
new text


Why dDo bBeaches iInspire pPoets?

Can I see only p Purple-black crows pecking at bones,
at carcasses of coastal pine polished white
by the shore's persistent appetite of the shore.?.
But this is only the opening metaphor, of course.
Imaginative reasoning, at best.
Or Aat worst, a newsflash from the interior.

Farther up the beach, I find a bullwhip of sea carrot
lassoeds back around itself, encircling
an unlikely pile a pyramid
of rose quartz. A An unlikely
miracle of nature? Or merely the yet
another ghost
of human thought
hovering in the landscape?

Clouds dart, and a sudden sunbridge
throws offers an invitation to crossover the ocean
to explore a farther, unseen shore.
But that is tT Is that alsoT But that is too great a leap
of faith?. AOnto a tenuous layer of sunflakes?
Glimmersings on a watery surface, golden ephemera
that offer no sure foundation?
Only more metaphor?.
No human ever walks on water.

Where a drainage pipe juts
from a descending hill
I hear singing, an unexpected
polyphonic chorus of
monks intoning OM, shifting, layered timbres
of wind echoing through an open pipe,
a kind of Genius that fades
to a whisper and then silence, almost telling me:
Time does not start here.

Kneeling down, Awed Inspired, nonetheless, I kneel down
I to reposition a clam shell
to its best advantage.