The Waves

The waves today are whales:

curling flukes of foam

that dissolve and vanish forevermore

as each wave folds upon itself

to break at my feet in a rush of white

here on the Oregon shore.

These are the leviathans of the Pacific

become one with their ocean home,

but more than this: these journeying giants

have now become the ocean itself:

tails of water, tails of foam.

In my vision it is the waves

which take the forms of tails,

slapping and rushing at the sand

to beach themselves at last,

wet and exhausted on the shore.

There are no whales, not today.

Perhaps tomorrow,

if I walk this same stretch of shore I will see them:

plumes of mist in the grey distance,

cruising the tug of currents

to their feeding grounds in the north.

For today, I have the white tails of the waves

with their memories older than an age

to remind me of times before my own

when all was new and beginning,

and the whales, the slide of currents,

the great ocean’s roll

were all and everything,

and the floating moon and the island sun

and the whales and the waves and my soul,

then as now, were one.