Certain words you wonder how you could’ve gone
so long not...
Certain words you wonder how you could’ve gone
so long not knowing. One crossed my path this weekend. Spindrift. Do you know
it? It’s the spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind.
Here on the coast of the northeastern United
States, the hurricanes settled themselves at sea and did little else but panic
wind chimes, cause premature leaf detachment, and swell waves. And the spray
blew from the crests of the waves; spindrift gives the wind a shape, a white-grey
speed as waves hurl themselves toward shore. The spray, ripped from its crest,
seems to race the wave toward rock or beach.
The poets must know about spindrift, I
thought. They do.
“I sit listening/To the surf as it falls,”
wrote Galway Kinnell in a poem called “Spindrift” published in the New Yorker in 1964.
The
suck and inner boom
As
a wave tears free and crashes back
In
overlapping thunders going away down the beach.It
is the most we know of time,
And
it is our undermusic of eternity.
So waves’ thunder gives time a sound. And spindrift
gives wind a shape, moving like sparks flying off a fire’s jostled log. And if
waves speak to endlessness, to all time, the spray whistles now.
[Painting: Over the Sea 20 by Randall David Tipton]
