Tide

Tide

For a year I watched

as something—terror? happiness? grief?—

entered and left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,

Not knowing how it went out.

                                                                Jane Hirshfield

                                                                The Envoy

It strikes me it might be heavy

with rain today.  Or maybe, given

the broad enough seam coming

undone over the home

across the street, there’s hope for

a change to sun.  I’m going

to say it’s ok either way

and what all this finally getting back

home gives into is the ease

of routine I’m so used

to moving through, close enough to

the clouds that today go, on their way

south, the way I was once

yesterday, before I made it, the middle lane

of the highway was my particular

long-term companion.  Some of the time

it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who’s just
made it theologically 

himself, righteously criticizes Hitler and all

the Germans who clutch the shreds

of their identities to the under-

neath pocket of their rib-skin and when

they’re naked and enraged

they claim their claims.  It’s happening

again, here, in the wide open,
like rain,

and the children, 

taught on street blocks, on ships docks, 

on oceans, in dense woodlots, watch
what all fall down: sometimes or get washed off
sometimes, or get caught sometimes,
contrary to the direction it was cut

and then hung up in the arms of other

trees, or on shards of sheet

metal and jags

of glass, are punctured up the spine

from the bottom all the way

through.  It’s what its come to while
some of us are busy,

busy walking across the soft

mud at low tide, fast enough to not
get stuck in it,
slow enough to not

fall on the rise and dip or completely
in the ocean-owned
holes the clammers abandon

knowing all along the water will come

and erase them like they were never

there, like their bent back, touching

the clouds, (watch, it’s that exact horizon

if you stand off at the right height
and far enough off)

they look like one thing moving,

a community of digging and drifting,

sinking and breaching, the wind
their prime

intimate while they split and stitch, come

undone and, like Bonhoffer, God

Rest Him, have it packed it in for them
at the end while the tide

comes in, in and in, in

and in.