Ashore Here
Michael D. Riley
Afternoon at Cape May Beach
Always the fatigue-green waves rolling into white spray
and curdling foam, time sanded down at our feet,
filled only with mirrorings like wet glass,
overtreading footprints, half-buried shells,
the heaving shoulders of the surf unfatigued forever
A knobbed horizon of anonymous fishing boats,
a harmless Dunkirk of grey vessels on a grey plane,
sea and sky met grey on grey, graced briefly
by a white schooner, swan among the paddling tugs,
pulled effortlessly past our eyes
Kids romp and jig stiff-legged up and down the sand,
chasing their elbows and knees, laughing and crying
almost at once, as full of disjointed energy
as the colonial toy with the segmented wooden man
who dances on the spanked piece of wood
The loud family well-matched on the next blankets
squawk like gulls at one another, anger and love
the same barking tone, a steady fiber
of tough brown words their staff of life
(two of their five progeny dig a hole nearby
big enough to bury both parents in)
Young women pulled along by their full hips
sway lightly breast to thigh and ankle,
each of us sculpted for ends beyond these ends,
carved flesh and bone for others—
to bear, repair, embrace them, some of us
to stare and take notes, square the circles
of our lives together where we find them beached
Small planes lumber just beyond the shore
trailing commercial messages. I supply my own:
This tide along our bloodstream flows. Each grain
a seed. Together we are distanced here.
Vast anonymous comfort comes. This slow propelling life
observing. My messages incomplete begin. See next plane.
Kites of good memories, bright and precise and small,
dip and soar above the waves, then drift back lazily
toward the beach and all of us on holiday beneath them,
their grounding ropes almost invisible at this distance
Poetry
ISBN 1-59661-090-5
60 pages/$9
In Michael D. Riley’s Ashore Here, “here” is the point where ocean and sand, both in flux, meet, and then, shifting, meet again. On the beach at Cape May or Ocean City, the poet meditates, physically and spiritually suspended between the timeless cycles of ocean and the very much timed and created world he inhabits for merely his lifetime.
Riley has a sharp eye for the largeness of small moments: “From behind my book a schooner appears./Ranked sails mizzen to spanker, stillness/moving full in the wind, equipoise//itself behind the flag of the flying jib.” In four lines, with self-effacing grace, he brings together and considers, with deep, quiet intelligence, stillness and movement, book and world, perceiver and perceived, and running through it all is the poet’s sheer pleasure in savoring the names of the world’s things. And all that’s just for openers. Read Ashore Here and learn where it goes.
—Andrew Hudgins,
author of After the Lost War and Ecstatic in the Poison
In Ashore Here, his latest book of poems, Michael D. Riley scans what Wallace Stevens called the inhuman and veritable ocean with a very human and humane eye, as well as an ear quietly attuned to the rhythms of simply being. Like the seashore beside the poet’s Cape May retreat, these poems wear their immensity lightly. Though like a collection of luminously rounded shells they also resonate with the depths.
—Daniel Tobin,
author of The Narrows
and editor of Irish-American Poetry
from the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Ashore Here, Michael D. Riley’s new collection of poems, gives a voice to “the ghost on the beach,” delivering an ocean-front landscape “on the shoreline of mockery and pain.” These are finely crafted poems for the “students of after and before,” and reading them brings pleasure and grief. The “years do not mute but ratify” these deeply felt meditations full of scrupulous, fleeting, grown up truths. Visiting the beach with Riley is an experience readers will not want to miss.
—Kenneth Fifer,
author of Water Presents and After Fire