I think what it comes to is the bewildered heart in us, Which year by year measuring our slim attainments With mounting despair, still feeds In its recesses some faint hope, despite The certain knowledge that what it hopes for Cannot change the tide, And in these moments, a joke, shaggy, cosmic, learned or foul, Needs no defense. Truth was our hope of haven then, not death nor the false calm of corporate mooring posts, yet there I stood on a sea of Tyrian shag, my interview splashing out to anchor me. In recommended pitch I bobbed and belled alert, computable energy for hire. Black gulls sit on the sea, and nettles, sovereign of inshore summer silences, roll out in copper waves to meet the ocean wave. Like every native boy, I heartily climbed these rocks as fat as kings, and studied the momentary pools composed no more of water than wind, and for hours took the rock crab's view of things.
Slick clouds clatter into our sky like ice blocks into a punch bowl.
We walk wet swollen earth, you small, glistening, holding my thoughts as if they were my hand. Foundering windmills creak a few stiff turns at the sky, pumping only the rising fog of afternoon. Repeatedly they are halting, checking their joints for life. The old barns, bleached and battered by a century of fury from the sea, still breathe through their scars. They groan and sway like alcoholics, dazed at the unguessed emptiness of years.