Surfer at Moonstone Beach

1.

He paddles the swash,
colors of mud,
whale stone, stationary
clatter of driftlogs
pushed, caving dunes.
Sideways to the ocean,
he times the sets.
Wave to wave,
the sky goes, turning
the sun's far fire,
Tokyo, Beijing,
the unstitched
nets of city lights.
Against the deeps,
the wave lines
shine, blueprints,
letting go the blood-dot
center of sea-foam,
blossom of queen anne's
lace; in love with
the glow of dwellings
the soul reaches for.

2.

It is cold.
The soul falls,
part of the air
splits, skimming
meteor light,
moon tide running
under foam cups
the color of
donut house
fluorescent shine,
the soul's bee-buzz
turning inward
on blips of memory:
sea otters run
sleeves of nerve
slithering to fish,
hunger, hauling
onto rocks, the seals
who hold the end
of California,
their eyes setting
a horizon.

3.

Inside a wave,
the soul curls backwards,
a sliding displacement
breathing salt air.
Legs numb into water,
arms windmill,
floating over the bar.
Face to ocean.
The sunship
draws shadow sails
down conifer hills.

4.

I was
being followed.
I felt you, mist,
huge waves
whomped onshore,
heat in the veins
running fossil channels
up the nerve's grain
along shorn trunks
of Douglas firs
, saw you, tripping from
splayed roots
like branched energies
antlering auras of
ecstatics, your hands
the hands of
the donut house
customers holding
folded sacks,
cups' steam reaching
skyward past adobe
tan walls, the offerings
to a former life.

I saw satellites
trawling red sparks
from Pacific twilight,
nets of contact
through the deep
of the sky.
On the out-breath
beach, you stood,
waves with their luminous
flags furling
toward woods
that reached back
the final slope
to the house;
the cedar boards
of its fence planks
tapped by your signal,
what woke coyotes,
barking the night
to life, years
stretching down
the curl of space
to this point,
your moment.

5.

Nine below zero.
I love you.
You sleep as I can't
help but, like water loves
the sun, love you,
carrying its light,
scales of a serpent
who, eating the world,
lets it shine, turning
this house to a furniture of sounds
each iced window
reaches to, from the ermine-edged ears
of whitetails that stand, listening
as frost cracks, loosening
what separates us
to the movement
of energy, memory and
imagination, and wind from
icy stars tonight.

6.

My gaze lifted
in double-takes
at the coil
of vultures swinging
oily rings
above the pit.
You held bulbs
of soul light
haloing paper
lanterns hung, lighting
the entrance,
the hundred-foot
waterfall, streamering
the bluff face
onto cobbles,
the wave-smoothed
sand two lovers
wrote, churning into
JAH LOVE
with their footprints,
their bodies
circling the gate
of sunlight
riding driftwood
stacks, a mandala
the shape of
the Crab Nebula.

7.

Mountaintops
stained with aspens,
from 35,000 feet,
turned, uncoiling Utah,
a diamondback
pointed west, each ridge
encupping a town,
each town resending
its road to thread
the coal mine valley.
You were there.

8.

Sleeper waves
rope kelp
dredged from beds
off the shore
holding souls,
women and men,
who struggle
to rise, breathing
prayers confessing
by nightlight,
the love of
this world, swaying
in the filtered,
silt-glittered dims
a crib's cross-hatched
shadows play
on the eyes.

9.

We looked at stars
spilled down the point,
broken cupfuls
in huge waves
poured through
space, the light
swallowing continents,
separating from
the living
the yet to be born,
hunger for love,
a belly to feel
that hunger.
The least effort
in the opened
wings of spotted
gulls tipping
aloft.

To die,
to be born,
rocks the tide.
The whoosh of breakers
unraveled out of us,
a music of clicks,
whale voicings,
the song your soul
carried, riding
its nine-months night.

10.

Waves disappeared
into rocks into black crabs
shuffling entrails of a
monk seal's corpse,
into rock flies shuffling
categories, intervals,
transience and remedy,
into Moonstone Beach,
humming birds,
the hundred-foot
trunks of dead fall,
cobbles like the shaved
heads of acolytes,
the push of waves
chanting incarnations
of Kuan Yin
to a Chumash otter.

11.

You slipped
from its paws,
the thumbkiss
to the forehead
the briefly
less inebriated
drifter lifted,
pressing his thumb
as he whispered
"God bless you"
to the teen cashier,
the Big Sur woods
a gold-rush way-station
crowded with ghost 49ers,
soiled dungarees,
swollen knuckles,
sprung from placers
her magnetized
voice shook
when she sang back
"You, too."

12.

I saw there
how stars open
the story that ends
the man I rode in as,
Lompoc to
San Luis Obispo
losing his names
by degrees
until you were possible.
The wallet emptied upward
its fool's journey
of dollar bills and credit,
for the skeleton dog
who tracks seasons
at the cliffs' edge,
the heels of the hunter.

13.

Off Moonstone
the surfer sits his board,
the flow-back
drawing him, a period
severed, drifting west,
the opened end of a sentence.
Eternity, interrupted
by time, patterns wave's
connection to wave,
soul to body, ghosts to wisps
of fog wreathed in park
cypress branches.

14.

Wind pours
the sound of kettles
onto trees holding
the lace of veins
the icy stars
weave themselves to.
Imagination before words,
connects dog to hunter,
hunter to dog.
Love reaches the other
inside, as fissions, releasing
the soul of a son
who much loves his father,
in the soul of a father
who loves his son.

Ted Lardner teaches yoga in Ohio. Tornado, a chapbook, is available from Kent State University press.

Email: Ted Lardner

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