West

[Ghost]

West, now.

West, and the sea behind
me, and all the depths of it nightling,
and the salt tears of the gull crying,
and the high thirst of sky
wet-kissed on the lips,
and the drape of the moon's veil
on the ocean after;

west, beyond the pickets of the far ridges
and all the dark of them, rising,
where the sun of late stables its fires,
and the chuff and the stamp,
and the spark of their teeth on the bit
are storms to trample and scatter
the silk of the rows, to shy the stars
creeping like barn mice over the ruin
of the prairie after.

West, and all the waves there stone,
and all the mists of them, ghosting,
and the crests of them clifted
with strange whorls and stray bone
(remembering forgotten, elder seas),
and the troughs of them frothed
and shallowed and shadowed by the break
of boulders strewn like spindrift
and spray in the lay of their pebbled hollows.

West, away and to,
and all the stillness of it, moving,
until I am sunk beneath those earthen waves
and reef my creaking pineboard craft
amid the spindled corals of the aster,
to slip this sudden, broken shell
and drift like dust, like glinting, mottled sands
among the stormless reaches of all
the prairies and all the oceans after.

[mnaz]

Cool. Reads like heading for a long retreat in the stone waves of the desert mountain west...

[Doreen Peri]

Ahhhh.... that is absolutely beautiful poetry! Wonderful! I need to read it again!

[saw]

like lyrical geography.....there is music in this poem that sings of the big bang....the west is more like Mars than it like like the east....well done