On this strung-out strand where once the Saracens raided and the bishop defended, now only surf whirs in— tumble, soothe, and seethe of waves at a slow boil. We lie motionless and cracked as driftwood. Middle age has tossed us here. Salt sears each wave, sand crusts your eyebrows and the rim of each ear and the sun licks hunchbacked breakers with a tongue of fire.
Hypnosis of foam: the surf sounds endless. Nothing is endless. The cathedral of Maguelone hulks, a battered shell on a wind-roughed island. Sea gulls perch on the rafters in the shadow of cypress. And if we two, sprawled below on the sand, are burned and offered, it is to no god we will name and the sea that lulls us is spelling its own end.
Yet we are given. For now, day is suspended, a kiss is a salt mirage in smitten air, the brush of your hand on my hip a tremor of sunburn. I could see you, but instead I turn my head, glance up, and the whole sky hurtles down—and where we were, we aren't: just a long horizontal seizure of aquamarine. Tide spittle. The shuddering shore.
This poem wonders about time. The middle-aged lovers on a French Mediterranean beach are acutely aware of their own age, of the “salt mirage” of eros. That fragility is set in the larger context of history: Maguelone was part of a Roman province, was fought over by Visigoths and Franks, and its 11th century cathedral is now a ruin. Each moment of peace and love is threatened.
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"Real poetry, Itō reminds us, doesn’t only come from a poet simply saying something—it also comes from the ways that the poet resists the ordinary processes of saying. The writer unlocks new potential by subverting, manipulating, and defamiliarizing the patterns that structure our logic and expression. Poems need to be more than a series of simple, ordinary statements strung together."
