“The Surf”

“Isolated, the lone prow-rock, its top filigreed with bird-ordure, stood gloomy in the fading light, alternately burnt umber, drab, and gray-brown at various heights. It could equally well have been the tiller of a colossal stone ship of a mythic race. Adjacent masses must have crumbled, leaving it to make a courageous last stand against the ever-winning elements of wind and wave. Incoming surf smoothed the beach where it reached, leaving the upper stretches confused in pockmarks, dapples, scratches, prints, and ruts. The sun’s light had faded, the star itself now invisible behind the cloud cover. Seriate waves stretched out before my eyes like the undulations of a carpet whose padding is uneven and bunched. The receding tide left behind an orphaned stretch of still and stale water. Without the movement and energy of the recurrent waves this water seemed dead, brackish, and forlorn, like a battlefield once the fighting has ceased. Gulls, like corpse robbers, stood atop exposed stones and, with darting beaks, picked for crabs. Patches of myrtle-green seaweed spread haphazardly over rocks and across stretches of sand like the capes of dead centurions. Stillness loured over the area. Amidst the echoes of former crashes and susurrations lay an eerie inactivity. For the seashore demands movement and might, thrust and withdrawal, and the cleansing erasure of salty waters across sandy plains.”