The Seastack

By CHRISTOPHER DEWEESE

I walked out there
between the boiling tides,
where the sky turns into a horizon
and the whales go global,
swimming like happy boulders
in an asynchronous landslide.
The waves remembered themselves
like oft-chanted prayers,
carving soft insignias
against the windward side
of the land the land abandoned,
the sheer, giant rocks
that measured just how far
the ocean had come.
In some ways, we were both pretending
to do the work of glaciers,
our hands brushing away foam,
our every step measuring tiny erosions.
The salt paid us
by sleeping within our lungs,
holding our breath
the way song does,
casually parched and humming.
A few trees grew atop the rocky glistening,
suspended mid-air and wizened
like parachuting skeletons
thrown towards the shore
from an unspecific disaster,
each one caught as my body was
between the euphoric dolphins
and the drifted logs
cast up against the sand,
where blown-out tentacles
of translucent bull kelp
mulched the tide-line into a fortune
gulls read with their beaks,
slowly picking away
this world of evidence
until all that was left
was one sound repeating infinitely,
the flurry of wings
my whole vacationed soul
would soon become.