Desiderata

Desires are already memories.*

I have come to expect
too much of the ocean.

The tide is out again,
researching the month.

Somewhere to the north
lies a heart-shaped reef –

here, a scarab mid-hegira
from its burning island home

clutches in death
a charred Banksia leaf,

bloated and afloat only because
of its legs’ grim marriage

with the leaf’s serrated edge.
And now my eyes approximate

its tough, unprisable grip, to
the grasp and clutch and

grab and quip of everyone
who’s ever known

what it means to not let
go the only thing to come

their way amid the salt scrim
and vicious sprint of the wind.

A union then, with leaves, and
other small commuters on the gust

of no apparent consequence.
For what we seek to hold to

when the world has
loosed its hold on us

may be what prevents us
from never having been.

Or could it be the wind discloses
that which we cannot relinquish,

even in death, and it is this that carries
us from our hearths to foreign beaches,

there to hit upon what each we must,
what it means to be alone, at last –

even if only another island in the bay?

Sadness comes in a wave:
the ocean has no stake

in this, betrays no particular desire,

nor any to remember –
perhaps begrudging each our tiny fire.

* Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities