Diary Notes

Last night I set up camp
beside an ocean
I’ve never seen. Waves break here

without habit. Sometimes
there’s a rhythm that’s almost
human, a sense of dance.

Then it’s the punch,
the muscle of currents. As I listen
to that thumping, my body

shakes, the tent shivers,
but the waves are all noise,
I’m not afraid. Sometimes, though,

everything stops, the sea
tucks into the sand like a neat
wooden joint. Then, I lie awake

and pray for the tides
to crank into action, but it’s
lathed out there. Once I left

the tent, pulled tight about me
the hessian air.
The moon was a sigh

on my hand. My father
said that silence was reason,
there was power in it. Once,

I think, he camped here.
Yesterday the forest howled,
a storm of vines and branches

broke about me,
I saw no living thing.
The darkness was meat

salted with grains of light.
A bird coughed up a cry
that was old. My father

said there was no way back,
that the soft world died
when you left it.

It will be dawn soon,
I must stop writing this.
I pray for a word

to keep me from drowning
when I take the first step
onto that bound sea.

The sun’s clear vowel
shocks the horizon.
This is the eighth day.