Collected Poems
Sea-Wind and Setting Sun
Sea-Wind and Setting Sun
There is not anything more meaningless
than sunlight falling on broken water,
the shattered light mixed with the shattered water,
falling, sucked back to nothing.
The tide falls and reveals the shells,
returns and covers them. The sea
dresses the shore with weed, to no end.
Lovely the leaping fish, the falling wave,
the foam on the reef, the sinister current
of dark water sweeping the rock,
idle and lovely these.
And so beside this nothingness I leave you.
We have outlived this life: we are disembodied.
So, like a leaf quitting a tree, I go,
and by your leave take leave
of what we may never again
not ever again in this dispensation
hope, or dare, to achieve.