“An Atom in the Universe…”

Tags

Fishing, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Pondering, Quotation, Science, Sea

“…I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. There are the rushing waves, mountains of molecules, each stupidly minding its own business, trillions apart, yet forming white surf in unison. Age on ages, before any eyes could see, Year after year, thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet, with no life to entertain. Never at rest, tortured by energy. Wasted prodigiously by the sun, poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea, all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity, living things, masses of atoms, DNA, protein. Dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto the dry land, Here it is standing, atoms with consciousness, matter with curiosity stands at the sea, wonders at wondering…I, a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”
– Richard P. Feynman

Craggy Fool

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Gloom, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sea, Storm

A hairnet of pink lightning
Flames across glum skies
Shadows saunter, charcoaling
The Sea’s velvet skin

October wind coos
Across ruffled iron peaks
The Brine percolates
Each heaving sigh beckoning

Violently out of place
Craggy Fool remains
Askew at the tide-line
Like a lazy sketch

His bulged back still aches
From last night’s dune-pillowed sleep
Nascent rain oozing
Down the minefield of his face

A lifetime of anomie
Stings in his shoulders
His nails chew through leather palms
His eyes cloud with Storm

He envies the clams
Where dungeons feel like Home
And little mole crabs
Soothed by every ruthless blow

Silent moments
Rarely come
Through the ocean thrum

From cinder plumes
Scavengers plunge
Ranting, brash and loud

Tearing out his thoughts, like guts
Twirling filipendulous

How I Wish There Were No End to Rain

Tags

Black and White, Death, Florida, Grief, Introspection, Music, Nature, Ocean, Pain, Photography, Prose, Quotation, Rain, Sea, Writing

I loomed beneath a dark feathering of sea-oats, pointed tips glazed with recent rain. I listened to the subdued murmur of little waves. The fetid and russet beds of sea-wrack had been washed away, leaving the sand barren and strange. A forlorn gull loitered at the swash line, analyzing the crinkling water as it fizzed in and out.

Distant lightning lazily branched from the moody-blue squall-lines and spidered across a sullen sea of herbal green. Coy ghost crabs emerged, removing dark masses of dripping sand from drowned burrows. They built little, lumpy mounds around the entrances to their small, black holes.

The storm was leaving me. How I longed for it to stay.

I was tortured the other night, seized with the memory of my little Siamese cat squeezing her eyes tightly shut for the last time. How swiftly she was gone, her soft, cinnamon cheek resting upon a colorful, flowing blanket that masked the metal slab beneath. I had never seen an animal euthanized, before. I understood, logically, that it ended the physical misery of her little, bony body.

Yet, how troubled I am by that last image of peace…of life tenderly released.

My mum died of a similar ravenous kind of disease. I remember that final image. Her face waxen and unreal, her mouth a small, black hole. She did not tightly close her eyes. She was not escorted quietly, through a warm wash of sleep, into the darkness beyond. Yet, I was not so disturbed by her image in death. And how vividly there lacked any look of peace…

I do not know what that reveals about me.

But I wish the storm would never leave. I want, forever, to hear its screams over this cold and fleeting sea of herbal green. How I wish there were no end to rain. Just as there seems to be no end to Grief.

“Darkness settles on the ground
Leaves the day stumbling blind,
Coming to a quiet close
And maybe just in time”
– From the song God Only Knows by Joe Henry

Ocean Static Fills My Ears…

Tags

Abstract, Beach, Black and White, Florida, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sea, Water

Sibilant words
Lumber off the sea

Ocean static
Fills my ears

The dunes shrug
Cicadas throbbing

The scent of distant rain
Hanging in a hammock
Of gauzy wind

Fingers probe
Like crab claws
In cold-packed sand

As I listen
To the conversation
Of the waves beyond

Upon a Bed of Sugared Sands

Tags

Black and White, Death, Florida, Nature, Ocean, Pelican, Photography, Poetry, Sad, Sea, Seashells, Video

Ramble on the shore
Trundling through icy sea-lace
Churlish waves hissing

Grey ocean mutters
Skimmers rise in a black plume
Through a scrape of rain

A severed wing rests
On a bed of sugared sands-
Moon mounts the dunes

“The Sun the Color of Pressed Grapes…”

Tags

Abstract, Beach, Black and White, Blur, Drear, Experimental Photography, Nature, Ocean, Pensive, Photography, Quotes, Sand, Sea, Twilight

“He opens his eyes and stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is gray and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute and dark over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a seagull floats on motionless wings. Its cry is weird and restless.”
– Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. ”
– Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“If You Don’t Become the Ocean…”

Tags

Beach, Bird, Black and White, Brine, Dawn, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Quotes, Sea, Waves

“I was a man who thrived on solitude… I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
– Charles Bukowski, Factotum
“If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
– Leonard Cohen
“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
– Søren Kierkegaard

When the Surf Fisherman Decides Not to Wade In

Tags

Beach, Black and White, Dawn, Fishing, Florida, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Sea, Seabirds, Sharks, Sunrise, Surf, Video, Waves

(Some feeble footage above of some hunting bull-shark chums of mine as they spilled up into the shallow swash as the tide began to recede. Is there anything better than having a shark swim up into one’s lap? I think not!)

I had a meeting with the Sharks that Sunrise, and they kept their promise. I arrived to the bruised sight of a brooding squall that aged the sky, scudding in and consuming the Dawn.

Pale rosy lightning sniveled across the slate blue of cloud as a lone dolphin breached cold in the distance.

And there in the swash the pastel waves frilled and shivered as a cool wind lumbered forth, and a surge of fish spat out from the sea as the Sharks surfed right up to my feet.

The Surf Fisherman decided not to wade in. I know not why. The water was glorious.

Pastel Sadness

Tags

Black and White, Experimental, Florida, Grain, Grief, Melancholy, Nature, Ocean, Photography, Poetry, Sadness, Sea, Sunset, Twilight

In a fatal blue fugue,
she bruises
the edge of an hour.

She swallows the
Evening’s clear cries
of dark-dipping gulls

flung across the sunken wound
of Sunset.

Her brash toes dissolve through
the wrinkly-white
sibilance of quiet Tide;

her cloudy dress of Pastel Sadness
dragging carelessly behind.

A summer child is Twilight,
as overhead, Night begins to swim.

And in a rasp of
Rain-stung wind
she mutters something soft
and inarticulate
as she kicks away
the last cherry shadows
of an old rusty day.

The Harbour

Tags

Beauty, Black and White, Boats, Experimental, Florida, Harbour, Moment, Nature, Peace, Pensive, Photography, Sadness, Sea, Story, Sunset, Thoughts, Writing

The harbour lay bare and waiting. I strayed from the Sun, looming in the underbrush, gazing out at bony masts and old tattered umbrellas, dangling in the languid breeze. The wind turbines purred softly as towers of crisp white cloud dripped into dark sinuous waters. A blue darner hummed beside my ear, my mind strewn with white petals, my eyes reflecting mischief. I waited there, hidden, beside the chafing dock, and watched as boats groaned in and out, as the dolphins played and the clouds grew dark and bruised in the distance.

And at last I crawled out, and was overtaken by a Sea-Faring-Man. He gazed at me with soft, sagging eyes of crackling blue, shimmering through a russet, canyon face. And then he stepped into his lopsided vessel and slowly glided away without a word, sunlight pounding into his white-cotton back. And as I watched him, snaking reflections dancing along the rim of consciousness, I perceived something all too familiar in that depth of grief, that lesion of sadness, that seems to ever-dwell in Beauty…