The Last Wave Before the Breakwater
The engine dies. The dream has by degree Come to where the green is lightening, the rocks Are somewhere in the civil distance — sea Is moving up in mist, a paradox Within this calm. Something is now to be.
The storm is distant, just the lights behind The eyes are left of lightning's ambuscade, But still the swell is present in the mind And now the panoply of waves is made By memory and allegory combined.
And it is here, the last surviving wave Which starting years away was following, A true occasion which the heart might save Its courage for. A very little thing, It says, to die, to rhyme into a grave.
And know the dreaming self will not relent Or convalescent mind afford its hope, The voyage ending here before its end, No harbour light, no casting of a rope, Wordless, auxiliary and irredent.
Peter Porter
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