Tide Pools

MARCH 1980

DAVE SMITH

TIDE POOLS

At dusk and long-distance they are the mouths

to another world, caves of silence that speak

only in light and, tonight, family packed

for home travel, we take a last, slow route

over sand the sea has been all day cleaning.

At driftwood the children stop, first veering

off wordlessly, and kneel to know some texture

of wood, or stand merely to dream themselves

freely into the gathering shadows of the land.

As we go ahead of them, we imagine their hands

collecting what seems to have waited for each,

shells, starfish, agates like a lover's eyes.

Then we also drift apart, each following deep

runnels the tide has left, and after a while

I see you hunched on a rock, almost part of it.

The light is almost gone and the wind chills me

so I think of my father's whistle, how it called

the sundered shadows of a family into the house.

But do not whistle now, through the lips he made,

for somehow we have come where we may be apart

and whole. Instead, I walk farther to the north,

until you are all taken into shapes of this place.

Then I find it, the deepest pool, rock-vaulted,

light bending and alive in water faintly moving.

I see the lacey deceptions, creatures disguised

as rock whose breath flutes in quick freshets.

A killdeer cries from the dark suck of the surf

and, though sweet, that darkness is not wanted.

This hole is filled with the last golden light

and by it I learn to see what I always suspected,

the small, quiet, incessant outcroppings of life.

For a while I stare into the spooling depth, for

here are hard black eyes and iron-shells, glitter

of hulls laid forever side by side like the dead

caught at last unwarily, perfect and untouchable.

When finally I whistle there is almost no light,

but there's enough. You come, then, invisible,

a sound made by the sand, a mingling of laughter,

and I duck under just in time, holding my breath.

How I love your squeal of delight when I burst up

like a king from underground! Soon we are all in,

all naked, splashing and crying like white birds.

The road home will be long and dark, the stars cold,

but collected, like this, we will be buoyed beyond

the dark snags and splinters of what we once were.