Wake while it’s dark
race the tide to hike
the beach from Nels to Nissen
early morning calm
water rolls out soundbytes
spits maroon seaweed
licks at jagged black shore rock
unforgivingly sharp
I scour westward
across the Pacific and imagine
a white pebbled beach covered
with blue glass
shattered seto sometsuke yaki
how many currents at work
to send garbage back and forth?
Toilet seats, plastic bottles,
and barbie doll heads
by moonsnail mail
sealed shut with salt
mirages of coastline
become surge channels
and I am left constrained
to highground; make believe
overland trails. My floundering is
awkward
and the dense bush is a walled fortress
entangled maze of impossible
windfall and salmonberry
my feet completely disappear
in green and emerge again
to the shock of walking
over a fifty foot drop
balancing perilously
on thick strong salal
growing seaward
above the cliff
at last the beach reappears
confesses to secret tide pools
blazing seafoam green anemones
endlessly patient, pushed and pulled
in choreographed dance
with the temperamental
deep dark blue.
Bio
Claire Gordon
Claire is an emerging West Coast writer. She is a settler of Celtic, French, and Eastern European ancestry. Her history working in the backcountry of Provincial Parks sparked an ecofeminist attention, which led to her meditations on human interaction with the land through narrative and documentary poetics. Claire’s previous work has appeared in Sea & Cedar Magazine and Portal Magazine.