The quickened glass
Of sculpted sea
That two slight mews
Sit rockingly.
Category Archives: The Sea
Mouche Appreciated
“Don’t ever think that magic is simply somebody taking a rabbit out of a hat. Our ancestors believed in magic and were right for the wrong reasons — for the most part they believed that magic was evil, not good. But the magic that lies all about you, from your own body to that of an elephant, to a fly’s wing as intricate as anything that lets the sunlight into Chartres Cathedral, to the great surging sea itself — that is magic. Anyone who goes through life unastounded by everything he sees is not alive.” — Gerald Durrell, Myself and Other Animals (2024), “Fragments from unpublished autobiography”
Sky-Guy for the Strayed Eye
The sky is in the sand,
That blend of sea and land,
Where ribbled pools
Make optic fools
Of eyes that stray or strand.
Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum
This poem is my sub-Housmanesque attempt to capture the sight of sky reflected in pools between wave-ribbed sand, so that there seemed to be another world floating there. I don’t like “optic fools”, where the adjective is obtrusively un-Anglish. But I also considered “photic fools”, for the alliteration. In the end, I might have used “eyeish fools”, if it hadn’t meant I couldn’t use “eyes” in the final line. Alternatives like “Of all that…” or “Of those that…” didn’t seem good. Oh, and “Sky-Guy” uses guy in the sense of “trick” or “hoax”, not as it’s used in the title of the TV program paronomasized in the title of this post.
Absolutely Sabulous
Smooth between sea and land
Is laid the yellow sand,
And here through summer days
The seed of Adam plays.
Here the child comes to found
His unremaining mound,
And the grown lad to score
Two names upon the shore.
Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine.
Shall it be Troy or Rome
I fence against the foam,
Or my own name, to stay
When I depart for aye?
Nothing: too near at hand,
Planing the figure sand,
Effacing clean and fast
Cities not built to last
And charms devised in vain,
Pours the confounding main. — A.E. Housman, “XLV” of More Poems (1936)
Trigintally Toxic Text
Triatom
Unda the Spell
A big-wave surfer braves a big wave (image from The Daily Mail, 17xi17)
(click for larger)
Ghost Coast
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
• “A Forsaken Garden” (1876), Swinburne
Krøyers Øje: Sand og Strand
Sommeraften på Skagen Sønderstrand (1893), Peder Severin Krøyer (1851-1909)
(click for larger)
Elsewhere other-accessible…
• Summer Evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach — more about the painting
Blue View Screw
Kerby Brown rides a big wave (photograph by Andrew Semark from ‘He’s maybe got a few screws loose’: the slab surfer taking extreme sport to new levels, The Guardian, 15vii22)
(click for full-size)
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 
