MAYDAY

Inspired by this photograph of the Maine coast…

Photo: Friends of Acadia FB page

MAYDAY

Drawing in to pull away
Coming near but never to stay
Rushing up, pushing past
Eroding you lap after lap

Salt lips whispering sweet love to wind
In thoughts conveyed but never spoken
Of a union made to you alone,
Fidelity unbroken

Each and every pass it makes
Promises proved with tokens;
Glimmering gems awash on sheets of sand
Hints of ancient treasure
Of pearl strewn chests spilling gold and coin
Come marvel at the shimmer
Of depths and pledges richly sung in songs of fluted shells
Relaying a bond bespoke, soaked in vows
But not out in the open
Among the swells and warning gulls,
Crying in the distance

Orchestrating hypnotic, lolling metronomic,
Keeping time outward-in
With a beat-back kick powerless
To save itself from a constricting twine
Of charming ebb ‘n flow maritime,
Artfully noosed around your reason

Spitting mist, wetting face
Spinning you without changing place
In a dizzying oceanic space of elating kinetic ions;
Determined as a lover bold seeking playful chase
And overwrought by its overtures,
You recklessly embrace

Breath that raw air deep!
An interlace of legs and breaks
Drenching upturned cuffs, soaking wayward up
Clammily climbing,
Numbing warm flesh colorless
Beneath layers defending frailty,
Flesh and bone complexities
Shielding body, but not the lucid mind
From beauty timeless as earth’s founding,
Watching virtues fall to foam and roil in the waves

Oh, that heartless churning beast!
Unconscionable its covert ways,
Stealing unreached dreams beneath offshore waves
Then reservedly detached, caring no more
Yet devoid of feeling as always before;
Heaving you on a rock strewn spit
Chocking on a merger of water and lung,
A union that ultimately works for just one

Did you raise a Mayday call, inverted flag, fought at all?
A single shout of protest to a lone passer-by
Or semaphore for solace if only in your mind?
Were you seduced in duress or did you silently acquiesce
To an unrequited love that won’t quit your mind?
A drink elating spirit consuming control,
Roiling tumultuous, drowning your soul
Leaving you dizzy in rapturous quake
Riling in repeated stuporous mistake
Ending as all liaisons do for the abandoned party,
Thrown over in a tryst too short
To justify a memory enduring

Self-congratulatory, turning first to split away
A scenario ridiculous as self-resolved indifference
Murmured clambering great slabbed dunes compressing
Stunted grass and rubble crushed;
Cresting in a stumble,
To a smack of heady churning water lust
Olfactory synapses firing before the view,
Euphoric

Just a pitiful enabler
To a boundless wasteland of wreckage
And wretched abuse;
Fickle with its timing, indifferent with its prey,
The moon its moody temper,
Weather its untempered wrath;
Devouring gluttonous with a gloating belch
Comprised of cargo hulls and snapped mast rigging
Glorious, in its far-reaching conquests,
Whether a riptide snare or galleon breach
Landing marooned or fathoms deep
On uncharted, forgotten floors

A life spared today is ever under threat
Calling clairvoyant onshore to your yearning
Wandering bereft,
Fingers fondle restlessly, pockets full of luster
Now turned to dull stone
Due to separation from that which made it shone;
Weighted with tug relentless as tide
Logic’s pulled under
Hand-in-hand with cognizance,
That bonding with a beloved insensate
Are only oaths spoken, gone to no one
Forever after, disavowed

(c) 2013 Rhonda Arnold