A poem I wrote about pelicans for your weekend:

A photo of mine taken not far from where I saw the birds that inspired this poem.

Wild Impermanence

by Jacob Edelstein

 

Just before last light,

seven shadows glide across

a mile of Pacific

Ocean in front of

me. I don’t see

them well, though I

feel sure they’re Brown

 

Pelicans: fourteen stocky bodies

and wing shapes bowed

and now backlit, cutting

arcs through three knots

of southwesterly wind. I

 

know this, I think,

because I almost see

it. Or I see

it, and then cast

it as knowing to

 

dispel impossibility.

 

It’s just that from

this cliff, the group

seems more than only

itself: reflections, too, multiplied

and split over the

lilt of water under

drooping sun. I lose

 

track of individuals, peering

to watch both them

and their mirror-selves scrawl

faint trails over a

surface that itself changes,

softly undulates, returns. One

 

dives and grabs at

a fish and I

feel rife with indecision:

unmoored by the wild

impermanence of the world

 

outside language

 

unsure why I want

to assert control and

wondering about the

hollow spaces inside me.

 

Their light bones, I

know, impose structure without

suggesting meaning. If I

could do that, maybe

I could fly, too.

A poem I wrote after Hai-Dang Phan:

Ocean. 

by Jacob Edelstein

After Hai-Dang Phan 

Ocean billowing out endlessly whipped and white-capped, lifted in wind. Ocean  glinting and wet with orange sun. Ocean always too far off, too much an unbroken  possibility. Ocean sucking at porous black rock, appearing over the crest of a hill, cold  and sharp in the morning, vast beneath a cutting keel, endlessly opening and lapping at  the spaces between our lives. Ocean moving around, through a pod of grey bodies;  babies surfacing to slap the water with their muscular tails. Ocean rolling in round and  heaving, smashing translucent, at speed, terrifying and tempting me. Ocean wailing in a  nightmare, dreaming of rising to retake the land, swallow a rocky shore. I tried to stop  it. Salted reflector of light and sky, bridge to more than any one want or fact, most  infinite inverse of what all I know of life, tell me what I mean to you when I float. I am  so tired, Ocean. Speaking of all I’ve already let slip, all your ways I’ve allowed to quiet  and die while you continue to roar. Forgive me, us, flow through this brick-laden now  to allow us all a then. Ocean, I’ve already chosen, and though I feel sick I know that this  too is a story, might become clear. Give me morning gleaming, unbroken over your  glass body. Find and carry me at dusk, allow me shelter, surety under your long and  heavy breaking wing. Ocean holding disparateness together, liquid tether for the only  world I know to expect. There is no other version, you say. It is a misperception of the  nature of matter in time, a trick of the eye, to see doppelgängers making “the other”  choices. All of this is you, me, a series of meetings with that which is stuck to the land,  your lapping in the aftermath of eons at the taste of something wholly new. You carry  away pieces of my edges; they sink and dissipate into your whole until I can no longer  see them, sense them; until in their place I come to expect what new forms you have left  behind. May I see that this is all one body shielded by the deep-drafting hull of a ship that carries heartbreak in a long-haul container of possibility. This is motion sickness, a  storm, clouds and fog that push on me as I am borne over you, that block out the light.  Roiling ocean I call Pacific, howl back at me, remind me I am needed nowhere but here  by your side.

Yours truly out front during a late evening Cove session. Photo credit to my sister, Rae.