Classic Poem

The ocean whose muffled explosions
put me to sleep last night also woke me
this morning, but not all the way,
and yesterday's blue shimmering expanse
has become today an unreflecting band
of milky green under a sky whose wash
of muted grays refuses to burn off —
Whistleresque, with here and there a white
scribble where a wave rumples over in foam.

All day I am some kind of daytime
sleepwalker, like the every-so-often
lone beachwalker whose place I take later,
trying to remember last night's dream
with my brother in it — nothing prophetic
about it, no sense of his being or having
been dead, only my brother again,
though all the details have been washed away
by the mind's equivalent of surf.

I wish I could remember it better, since this
is the only way I'm ever going to see him.
But even later, when the clouds knot up
into dark muscles, piling thunder
on the thunder of waves, and revealing in flashes
the sky's invisible arteries, nothing
in either world comes fully into focus,
except the steady pulsing of the lighthouse
blinking its warning to whoever is out there.











From Poetry Magazine, September 2006. Used with permission.