Suspended somewhere in between
the rhythmic, roaring silver of the waves
and patterned, silent gold of dunes
on Baker beach
I hear the pounding of a horse's hooves
where none is to be seen.
Tasha! Whoah!
Another soul awaits you in this place.
But you sweep by, unheeding,
maybe unaware of me.
You run like the ocean wind,
my friend,
your legs a blur against the sand,
with delicate face, dished nose,
and huge brown eyes
fringed with lashes thick
against the desert sun
from where your fathers long ago
had come.
I know whom you seek.
She is waiting eagerly
beyond the seventh wave of this,
the shifting, tentative border
between land and sea.
Her cap of dark, soft hair
tossed by the wind and mixing with the foam,
is hiding, for a moment, eyes
like night and deeper than the ocean
at whose edge alone, it seemed to me,
she found a place to call her own.
I see her laughing as she runs,
head thrown back and arms flung up,
directly toward a monstrous wave,
which towers high above her head
and, feeding off the backwash, drains the sand
around her almost dry.
She disappears beneath it, reappears
in furious burst of spray,
startling a curious seagull who,
investigating the commotion, got too close,
and now, complaining, flies
toward the distant cliffs.
She's spotted you! Face lit with smile
she runs toward shore.
Scarcely slowed,
you run again, my friend,
mane and hair merging, silver and black,
like sand and ocean
merge and form the changing paths
that you and she will follow now,
alone, for these are paths that neither I
nor friends who loved her, mourn her death,
nor other living men
have seen or known.
I saw her often. Only once did I see you.
And yet I saw a thousand times
in words she spoke, hesitant and shy,
in words she wrote,
which moved as if she'd trapped your spirit
in between the lines;
in words she formed,
with sure and master hand, into paintings
pictures, prints,
which brought
from mind and heart to life,
as only real art can,
her vision of you.
Only once
did she bring me here.
But here, not where we met,
I see her dance again to music
only she can hear,
laugh again at words whose meaning
blows ungrasped like wind's touch
through my ears,
trace again the moving line
that marks the boundary
of ancient, living ocean
and of raw land, scarcely formed
engraved in her face forever,
as in stone.
And you, my friend,
who must have sensed her hour approach
I wonder if you knew
that she would be unprepared for death,
caught by surprise,
and would need you.
I see her slip down from your back,
now walking at your side.
I look in vain for halter, rope;
the bond that binds you both together,
a heart of fire, single soul,
holds you to her when the line has broken
which once bound you to this sand,
a certain pasture, single stall,
particular place you knew as home....
And now you slowly fade before her eyes....
And for a moment
her tears fill the ocean's depths
and distant cliffs ring with her cries
as in her grief she seeks
to die again . . . .
And then she walks into the waves
from where she came,
fades,
and is gone.
Poem ©1989 by Catherine A. Hampton. All rights reserved. Do not republish or distribute in any form, electronic or hard copy, without the author's permission.
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