(Cove)
       

Sometimes it's no different than the sound of the surf,
this key oflight breaking on the shore of everything,
whisper conjured out of vacuum and hush, fathomless.

On the night you died the waves were lifting, the sands
a shifting membrane at Gravelines, Calais, the North Sea
one sea, and the sands multiplying myriad after myriad

falling short of infinity. So make each grain a universe,
each universe an origin that billows into next and next,
while each in its time, in its merciless time, waxes old

like a garment, and hastens out of sight. Now, this now,
a white heron stands at water's edge beside the inlet,
and those gathered on the walk, on the beach, pass by

un-regarding, private orbits of need and happenstance
coming to be, gathering in patterns, windfalls of seeds
along the jigsaw of a jetty—rockroses in the cracks,

delicate blooms.And of that other Now, measureless,
below the threshold of every knowing? "The evolution
of Providence," you said, "does not exclude the physical,

this living world with its random mutations, its accidence
harboring toward a goal." Is it risen, or descended,
this manifold mirror of bay and sky, horizon-less,

utterly still, utterly in motion, held, stretching across,
offered like a cup? A lifting, unencumbered, of wings.
At dawn a blood-red host; a blood-red host at nightfall.

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Copyright © 2016 Daniel Tobin All rights reserved
from From Nothing
Four Way Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission