How still the sky, on this estuary, tide out,
pricked by birds searching anxiously for crabs,
on an evening when the moon hangs low above
a boat moving close into this shore, trailed
by screeching seagulls seeing it safely
into harbour. Past a no-man’s land of
slot machines, hot-dog stands and car-parks. Each
wave unwinding itself upon the next,
upon the vexed question of this night falling
and you calling from the beach down below,
where your eyes are filled with absence, around
which your mouth is careless and which becomes
the unreal substance of a new kind of
faith, an end we look for in this birth of
words, in this seagull’s long dive as it skims
across water, a feeding on air here,
where this sea of uncertainty is the
best we can hope for. A certain indifference.
A certain unnecessary ‘yes’.