The Stacks

image by navin sarma


The Stacks

“I’ve always considered myself a minor writer.

My province is small, but I try to explore it

very, very thoroughly.”--Leonard Cohen

Thick fog clung like a cobweb

to that narrow couple of miles of coast

near Kalaloch, as we enjoyed a sunny

snippet of Indian summer, carrying

our picnic in a pink cooler out onto

a grassy bluff above the beach, tossing

a red tartan blanket over the lone park table,

trying to explain to our girls how a grove

of misshapen tree giants formed their burls.

Munching our apple & pineapple slices,

turkey sandwiches & sugar cookies,

we sat transfixed in soft silence,

drawn to the sibilance of the big surf,

never tiring of the eternal drama of waves

swelling, cresting, and pounding onto a beach

where sea salt, and broken colorful shells

were sprinkled on the gray-brown sand

like wild seasoning;

adorned with bleached Picasso-like twisted piles

of driftwood snakes, dragons, and ships of war,

bound up by fat shiny kelp whips, bent

around each other like Holocaust victims

in their killing pits, pausing patiently for 

varying degrees of petrification, gleefully awaiting

our pliant fingers to pluck some of them up,

rub them clean, and transport them inland

to reside within the sweetness of our garden.

A few short miles up the shore it seemed

that nothing could have prepared me for

the raw exhilaration of my first glimpse

of Ruby Beach, its steep trail dark with mud,

dropping like a sleeping lizard down through

a thick fringe of forest, the path continuing

past massive mausoleums & headstones of wood,

transitioning from large gravel to pea gravel

to a long naked stretch of slick black sand,

girdled with tall granite cliffs, that had wide jagged

crevices slashed deep within them, making

their edges resemble raised stone hands

with their fat ferrous fingers extending to heaven;

with seal caves and eel bore-holes carved

by the sea at their mossy bases;

all magnificent & mesmerizing, 

yet paled to nothing

when compared to the huge rock fists

that were the sea stacks, thrusting up

out of the soaked sand like biblical towers,

dotted with crewcut sea grass and short

hardy trees that were wind-bent

like old beach dwarves, and covered

with clouds of nesting gulls & terns;

magical monoliths standing alone off shore,

in ragged Neptunian squads up and down

the coast, survivors, as the fury of the ocean

had clawed at the cliffs for eons, and the stacks

just refused to go down, to erode, to bend a knee;

and one cannot ever gaze upon them without

being cheered by their defiance, 

being respectful of their heroics,

being awed by their beauty,

and transferring some of their tenacity

to the core of tensions brought

to that beach, and then left there

to deteriorate and blow back out

over busy waves.

Glenn Buttkus

February 2013

Posted over at dVerse Poets-Poetics

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