Seized by this beckoning

Wind From The Sea ~ Andrew Wyeth

Wind From The Sea

It comes in this way, from saltlands so far from here
it circumnavigates the senses. If you leave one open
or slightly ajar, it will part fine lace like foam to siren
your eye towards the distance from whence it came.

You will see this place in your mind though you’ve
never been there. It will be as familiar as a pair of
workboots, a place worn to the arc of your soul.
So you will go there without moving feet or foot.

A figure stands just inside this lapping, too dark to
quite make out, mottled in a saxifrage of shadows
that migrate like pilgrims across a pale landscape
of tidal devotion, its eyes set seemly to faraway.

They might be whispers you hear now, something
said just outside the cusps of perception, your name
misheard twice, a sussurance swept past too swiftly,
eddying, seacircling, then gone as quick as it came.

So you stand there waiting for it to come again.
It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Then it does because the
curtains bring it in and you turn your back to the
fingers that reach and reach just beyond the veil,

your flesh making brief temples between the blades
where praise and impulse press claims for each breath,
your skin a palette awash in ways only skin can catch
the colorfast, the whole world seized by this beckoning.

And this is but one window, one open sea letting itself
in, one shameless suitor you invite in for no reason other
than to stand naked with it, silent as unriffled paper,
turning together there on the pivot of a sail’s cry.

Joseph Gallo
January 19, 2009