“Nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit aeternitatum.”
(The now that passes makes time, the now that remains makes eternity.)
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

I
This is the city of air and foam
where heat from dunes and metal hoods of cars
dulls vision, and lights at night steam up the heavens,
and block the stars; where daylight’s ocean
muffles cries of children running
from moms to sea-froth filagree.
When I was young in time, rows of women,
lay on beaches, Venuses unearthed and vandalized,
with purple scrawl across the backs of thighs
in the pre-sun-screen sheen of baby oil and iodine.
The nacreous slick of yellow hair dammed
the flow of backs, bared and browning in the sun.
When I was young in time, I sat at the ocean’s edge
in the incoming tide and watched the sea
throw itself upon dry sand, again and again
and asked it: why life? why death? and why again
until the waves and existential whys were one.

II
If I spoke to the sea, would it answer?
Am I nothing but a minnow in the night,
galling the ocean in its vastness,
a scratchy sound, like a tin can
on its shore rubbing against a rock?
Water, I know you, I know you not,
hidden in my depths, as invisible as air.
You are baptism and blood.
I drink you, I wash with you.
With your brother wind
you can blot out cities
yet sing us to sleep
in our matching language
the throbbing of my heart,
the throbbing of your waves
as the dumb moon
with its tongue-tied force
calls me to collude with you
in surges of internal tides.
Water I know you, I know you not.

III
I lecture to this mystery.
But like Proteus who counts his flock of seals at night,
shifting his shape at every human touch,
each concept I pour sea into
explodes, becomes another:
bearded lion to boar
to fountain to towering tree:
it will not stay still. Concepts
are levees against the unknowable
that break and push us under
leaving the land inundated with unknowing,
becoming rich with dark silt, rife
with enigma, pregnant with our hopes.
Watching my dreams in combers come,
I swim to capture one, to ride it into shore
where surf meets text. Most I miss.
Most remain in the ineffable turning
of waves and the questing whys.

IV
One day when I was young in time,
my mother woke up early
to sit upon the porch that faced the westward bay,
waiting for the sunrise to set alight the sea.
We sat with her laughing and inhaling coffee.
Time right, place wrong.

Now when I am old in time,
my sister sits and faces westward
waiting for sunsets and eagles,
the moment of rightness
to snap a pic and applaud
each spectacle of eros:
each singular repeat of passion
in light’s affair with flood.
She posts these paparazzi snaps
to tack across her Facebook timeline
from spring with its spreading arms
to grey-eyed winter.

Now when I am old in time,
the blowing sand combines
with breath to cloud the sky
as coldness sharpens sight
enough to recognize the final chill.
As ice, the sea sets skin on fire;
as foam, it is my christ’ning lace,
that dressed my birthright carrion
carried ever closer even closer
in the flowing now.

Yet here nunc stans:
Never mind why life, why death.
They both live in a single sun
that rises each day and sets
in an ever-widening circles.
It only asks that I be here now:
with the taste of the god in the salty air
with the roaring of the ocean’s exhalations
with the gulls that plead for invisible bread
with the mystery, the many fathomed mystery,
of love that lives, timeless and deep
in my opened heart, more boundless than the sea.

-Kitty Yanson