Osborne Bay Beach, Crofton, British Columbia
On the walk to the sea, I heard it: the tuneless hum
of a worker bee, single-minded, somehow joyous.
Under the trees, I saw him: that slippery ribbon,
slick with intent, twisting liquidly into shadow.
And then the sky opened wide its arms, blue depth, sea’s mirror.
Like a weary traveller, I drank my fill: gasp of white foam,
waves reaching many-handed, faint blur of wings.
And that stream, forest-born, like a tear slipping off
earth’s chin, wound its way from soil to sand, its graceful
waterfingers reaching for the sea. And so I walked to that shore
like a pilgrim to a shrine, clothed in silence, reaching
into the living icon of the world. Beyond, the hunched shoulder
of the mountain; below my feet, white barnacles quietly blossoming.
And the sea’s peculiar music went on, that murmur,
those repetitions; indulging its own liturgical rhythm, unhindered
by human cacophony. On the walk to the shore I felt it,
the thing that is neither earthquake nor fire, nor even
the pounding choir of intemperate wind, but something
like a small voice, still as the fawn that stared back at me
ears aquiver, with deeps in its unfathomable knowing eye.