SEA-SIGHT: DAY ONE
northward the honshu coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry
the earth ended before us in oblique striation, horizon shaking as if drawn by hand. the driver swept one arm across and said something along the lines of, this is it. we were thrilling down the last light, which was already beginning to drown in the unthinkable appetite of the sea. it was strange how even the clouds seemed to have weights inside of them, pulling them almost to the surface of land.
pythagoric curvature of a dust-slope. one should not run to catch a vision (visions should occur like something unasked for), but I did. stumbling steps in downward trajectory to the stone paths shook sparse by earth-force, or water-force, or whatever it was that presupposed men to think of gods. at the end of it—(a very deep breath) the elapsing monument of colours. how could such colours ever find their space in words. should I say tangerine. should I say the thin purple of a peeled plum. should I say the unnameable centre of fires. the diffused sun cornering its round shape into another plane.
the byoubugaura cliffs are peeled open to reveal the ancient language of stone. the sand, the compressed powders of deep clay, the sediment of boulders worn to pebbles, the fossilized roots of fauna, the salt-stick grasses, the encompassed bones of animals—they form an immense gradient of time told. I was thinking, even this could be stripped away. something had clawed layers from it, in immaculate angles that only the sea could perform. how strange to think that what outlives our maps, our directions, our brief logic. . . is the very thing we have tried so hard to explain away with our frivolous measurements.
we take the barely-there tram to inubosaki lighthouse and climb over the ropes to the crevasses in the field, undulating tidally. the stars are too many, they are fighting the city. they are knitting a coarse transmutation in the eternal fabric of myth. it was very cold, the first ache of january teeth. in this year still raw from being born, I glimpsed at the hauntings that allow stories to be told, then told again, again, in perpetuity.
the process of feeling sameness is the recognition of time as delusion. to know that what you see is what has been seen ad infinitum. I am now starting to count the days, amidst all these arresting insinuations of eternity.
