Infinite Distances

Wharf

The tide in, the water swaying deep and slow –

a man will know the sea is the sea, nothing else, and yet know a gull

spiralling down, shrieking through the raincloud-roofed sky,

arrives here and takes up the sea in its beak.

A bow of twine gathered from four turning, infinite distances,

it lifts away with a magnificent present.

The gull will vanish, the inlet reappear –

and a man perches alone at the end of a platform. All he understands

how to mouth, all he must forget so he might go out from himself

in the gull's shrieking, will return to him,

scavenged bits of the cold beauty of the water in it,

the inlet swaying a moment in every word he knows.

The man will stand there, intact,

he will protect what he is. He will go out 
again and again from his wharf,

lightly in the world and a part of it, and bring with him

what he sees of what he is not
in the water's glittering, in its heavy dark –

he will go out circling wider and wider

through the waiting aperture of himself.

– Russell Thornton (The Human Shore)