back to
poetry
index

Ebb Tide
by Earl Coleman

And so noon clung to me,
hot as a honeyed maid,
and swooned upon the stippled sands
with me that day when seas ran,
gulls cree-ed, and from Gay Head
to Edgartown, the white sails,
bellying with wind,
raced from the land. But oh, I stayed
and hugged the hour to me,
browning in the brazen sun,
the frothy ocean running out between my toes.
And so our bind dissolved there in the salt,
me, marrying my elements,
and you eloping out to sea.

Now inland I remember being beached
and combing in despair to sift that mystery
which, open me, lay no deeper than the reach
of reason which plunges in a naked arm
to probe the bottom, two feet out from shore.