The Peninsula

When you have nothing more to say, just drive 

For a day all round the peninsula. 

The sky is tall as over a runway, 

The land without marks, so you will not arrive 

But pass through, though always skirting landfall. 

At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill, 

The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable 

And you’re in the dark again. Now recall 

The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log, 

That rock where breakers shredded into rags, 

The leggy birds stilted on their own legs, 

Islands riding themselves out into the fog, 

And drive back home, still with nothing to say 

Except that now you will uncode all landscapes 

By this: things founded clean on their own shapes, 

Water and ground in their extremity.

– Seamus Heaney (1939- 2013) Northern Irish poet, Nobel Prize winner, Oxford Professor of Poetry, and one of the pre-eminent poets of the 20th century 

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way. 

They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be –
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot lookout far.
They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet and teacher

Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,

then turned right along

   the surf

                         rounded a naked headland

                         and returned

   along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,   

crisp in the running sand,

       some breakthroughs of sun

   but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,   

from the perpendiculars,

      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends   

               of sight:

                         I allow myself eddies of meaning:   

yield to a direction of significance

running

like a stream through the geography of my work:   

   you can find

in my sayings

                         swerves of action

                         like the inlet’s cutting edge:

               there are dunes of motion,

organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance   

in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of   

primrose

       more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ...

predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,   

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

          from outside: I have

          drawn no lines:

          as

manifold events of sand

change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape   

tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept   

the becoming

thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish   

         no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek   

to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

       change in that transition is clear

       as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,   

allowed to occur over a wider range

than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:   

black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk

of air

and, earlier, of sun,

waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,   

caught always in the event of change:   

       a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals

       and ate

to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,   

picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy

turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in

siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

               the shallows, darts to shore

                            to stab—what? I couldn’t

       see against the black mudflats—a frightened

       fiddler crab?

               the news to my left over the dunes and

reeds and bayberry clumps was

               fall: thousands of tree swallows

               gathering for flight:

               an order held

               in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

          as one event,

                      not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter,

cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,

beaks

at the bayberries

    a perception full of wind, flight, curve,

    sound:

    the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:

the “field” of action

with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

            pulsations of order

            in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,   

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together   

            and against, of millions of events: this,

                         so that I make

                         no form of

                         formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override   

or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain   

the top of a dune,

the swallows

could take flight—some other fields of bayberry   

            could enter fall

            berryless) and there is serenity:

            no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,

or thought:

no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities   

of escape open: no route shut, except in   

   the sudden loss of all routes:

            I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will   

not run to that easy victory:

            still around the looser, wider forces work:

            I will try

       to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening   

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,   

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

--A R Ammons (1923-2001),American poet and National Book Award Winner in 1973 and 1993 from the Selected Poems, 1988

Lord, you are my island

Lord, you are my island.

In your bosom I rest.

You are the calm of the sea.

In that peace I lie.

You are the deep waves of the ocean.

In their depths I stay.

You are the silence of the spheres.

In that space I live.

You are the smooth white strand of the shore.

In its swell I sing.

You are the ocean of life that laps my being.

You are the Lord of my life.

In you is my eternal joy.

--Ray Simpson, from 40 Prayers from Celtic Christianity, 2014