The riptide
seizes my melancholy frame of mind,
bent on a
refractory gaze
and lost in
waves repeating their signature
on a dotted line
of shore.
I am captive of
the moon’s possessive marriage
with the tides.
A wave breaks,
rolls itself
into defeat,
splinters my
matrix of bone
and its
attendant marrow of memory.
Beads of
cut-glass sun
fold into the
white, rounded realm of surf
and shatter my
parallax view of life.
In this
dissolution,
I am a whalebone
soul
spewed from
Ahab’s gullet,
obsession with
mundane circumstance
broken into a
thousand liberties
carved by the
sailor’s slipknot heart
that fashions
scrimshaw with dexterity.
A thousand bones
of beauty
lie on the
beach, all of them pale points
and lines, shaved
into this idle art of the sea:
a pipe a horn, a
whale,
figures molded
into eternity.
I am broken by
the tides,
but in the sea’s
exaltation, free.
The scrimshaw is
me.
~William Hammett
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This is excellent, lots of good descriptions and detail in here
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