Another strato-cumulus rumpled underbelly of grey cloud blanket, with wind from southwest; a cooler morning though still summer warm. The high tide line barely makes it over the frontline shoreline wall to the south end of the beachy bay. A smoothed cliff formation ridge which the advancing water has formed and run over to a higher tide line above, then formed again on the way out. The moon has been mid-sky these last days, neither peak north nor south, the tides sometimes two high or low in a day, pulled neither way out nor way up, while the water has been helped ashore by the onshore wind. Further north, towards middle bay the more straighline wall and cliff line of the south gives way to a rhythmic interplay of rising and then falling rhytmic ridges, the whole shoreline breathing here, the high tide line just up and over the peak of each little ridge, where slightly to the north west side of each brief rounded cliff lips appear again similar to the long line further south, where water has run up and over the ridge lip but here has also run along it and carved out a slight wave formation. The watery horizontal waves of the ocean forming, after they crash, the same in the sand. And we see here how all such rock formations are made by such a flowing, by such a snaking, including Kaarta-Kitj Wave Rock further inland.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
Human in the Bay
There is a human being who lays himself down at the shoreline each day. His head lies to the south in the more wall-like form of the shoreline sand, the water held back there from its prevailing direction (a large granite groyne to the south we should probably mention). His head is up this end, all hard form and walls, like the bony borders of the head. He then moves further down as we walk north, towards the middle of the bay as it curves in, finding there a gradual easing and rhythmic breaking of the sand and water of the bay, as little ridges appear, pointing the way to the prevailing wave and wind and tide, each a little replica in miniture of the overall bay outside. Here we find a gradual procession to a kind of ribbing and breathing of the man in the up-and-down, in-and-out, movements of the shoreline sand, little bays within the overall bay, a tiny mirroring. Eventually, moving further north as the middle of the bay begins to curve back out again, we find the place where the often-dominant wind and wave direction rolls up ashore, and there we find no wall, nor rounded ridges of little rhythmic bays, but usually flat open sands with water sliding in on the shoreline walking way. Here the man’s limbs reach out and on, gradually stretching, bones thinning out to nothing, everything.
Human in the Bay—Another Way
A small sand-cliff line running the length of much of the bay today; from the southern part anyway. Same man lying down along the shoreline way. Head up the long cliff-line end, where the low, mid-sky moon barely makes it over the sandy clifftop, less waves, until we reach mid bay, where the slightly larger wave, where the shoreline turns, makes it up and over the sandyclifftop, rounding and flattening it, so we have little rhytmic ridges left, where the cliffline would otherwise have stayed; this ribbing section the middle of the man, carrying on until the ribs are flattened and the water moves freely one way and another as the bay curves back around to face the approaching waves. Here his limbs and belly are open to the world—his willing really, following the feeling of ribcage midbay, and the thinking of the hedy clifftop. The old man again there this day, but displaying himslef in slightly different ways—one of an infinite number of ways.
Ocean-Sky Mirror
The ocean-sky mirror is clear today. The ruffled underbelly of strato-cumulus winging in from the west with cooler wind in their sales, grey and rippled. The ocean surface overbelly below, from shoreline green through to a slowly-deepened blue, an equally-ruppled and riffled rushing and falling of little mounds and troughs, never still, changing though your eyes my settle on place. The rounded churning is not enough for a wave to break except where they fall to earth and rise to air at shoreline arrivals. Same as the clouds are not enough to break into rain, or the wind strong enough to fold over any temporary summits into foam when they rise. The ocean sky mirror is clear today, mild in its middling, the shoreline organism living, breathing, lawful.