AT THE SEA WALL

The whitecaps start far out;

they come racing in as if the sea,

uncontained by its huge meter,

were escaping from itself.

It leaves us little beyond

the dampening patch that marks

a pattern of insistent reach,

and a thin black line of mussels

for mottled gulls that eastward stand

a calculated distance from its path.

It will snatch back anything

we leave within its grasp.

All life, they say, once surfaced in the sea;

we roam like exiles in a banished land;

return, compulsive,to the sea's drawn edge

to glean its sealed horizons

in our mesh of discontent.

Its raging spent, the sea recoils

replete, entire, abated, spent.