SEA-SIGHT: DAY TEN

northward the honshu coast in an effort to honour the landscape with poetry

we wake up in a small village called rokkasho—the very young hours. day amongst all this night. I had dreamed nothing, under the waterless moon which is slowly gathering itself in preparation for wholeness. f wants to see the sunrise. it will be the last one of this journey. I am already counting the endings—the forms of last things are following one another like devoted acolytes, coming slowly and vividly into sight. finality is so commanding; it demands that all follow its singular reference, its obligatory sadnesses, the marks—which I suppose we can call minutes—it unceasingly devours.

there is only a handful of light until the sun is replete, but the sea is right there. so we pull the car over into the property of a streetside-waterfront house, and spread onto the edge that this piece of land occupies. a field of snow. an interlocking series of dark clouds (through which the light has shuttled a small hole to breathe). the sea threading its colours from end to end. I recall the lines of nazim hikmet: I didn't know I loved clouds / whether I'm under or up above them. he was writing that poem on a train (prague to berlin) during one of the last years of his life. I am writing poems that are talking to his. they are alighting each other. they are multiplying. the sun is shrouded a tunnel of clouds that it has excavated, but it is conscious, and it glows.

I am alerted to the fact that rokkasho seems to be a town that caters mostly to men. we were rejected from several inns and business hotels due to the fact that they are males-only. ah, this world is slow to change. we leave it behind.

we can’t find the entrance to the sarugamori sand dunes, so I search online and learn that it’s used as a ballistics test site and most of it is sealed off from the public. interesting. we find a route in anyway by driving to its tip, and take our long steps in the fresh crystals of snow to reach this pretty ocean hem.

the dunes go on for kilometres and kilometres. snow is glittering its halo upon it, disguising its true texture. only when our feet sink deeply into the shore can it be discerned as sand, fine and minute and hourglass-like. dialogues between sand and water are fascinating. the former is desperate to impress and to take on new shapes, and the latter insists on the purity of its conjugation. our footsteps erase. the dents left by our various materials erase. our presence is as silent as those of angels—imagined. I’ve left my pen in the car, so am dictating the stray lines that occur to me into my phone. when I listen back on them the sea is gloriously deliberate in the background. in one of the recordings, amidst a line about the foam that frays at the hem of the tide, there comes a moment where the water surges to swallow my feet; it is marked by a small gasp of sharp laughter.

our last stop now. (that melancholic word again—last.) the shiriyazaki lighthouse is on the very northeasternmost tip of honshu. it is the utmost comprehension of the pacific’s delineation of this journey. a few kilometres away from it, we suddenly come to a gate that forbids entry; the lighthouse—normally a welcomed destination—closes in the winter months. a feeling of utter desolation surprises me. how can we get this far and not make it? f turns the car around to try a different route. it is blocked off as well. we veer back to the first entrance. we park the car. we stride over the warning signs and the gates.

it is a long walk. the road is not entirely snowed over, but the parts that are (revealing the shapes of gone-shadows) prove to be deep and glassy. a distance of just under three kilometres is longly extended by curves in the winding road. it is maybe thirty or forty minutes until we first see the sea. then maybe ten or twenty more until we reach the cliffs.

the end. (are there any words larger than these in the english language?)

there is a small pile of stones, and a statue (dressed in light-bleached yellow and pink) sits atop it. the land is fractured and scrambles into the waters in irregular and mutinous shapes, darkly volcanic. the sea is occurring in damp radiances at its circumference. jewel-like. gesticulating. the lighthouse is graphically white, decisively heroic. this place was once called a graveyard of ships, for the many that had capitulated in its drastic shoreline. I think, there were days in which all one could do was sail towards the tiny light in the distance, and am reminded once more of how multifarious the roles of the sea have been—that it has been monster and mother in turn, a vision of despair and valour.

f and I hold one another. we made it, we both say. the whim of idea has transported itself through equal transactions of action and imagination to take the form of fact. the idea had given birth to days, ten days impossibly long and short, ruled by the immutable persistence of a north-calling. a sea-calling. this project—what had been only a figuration in my mind, a single fragment in the deluge, has held on to the coastline and borrowed from its perfect solidity to become the building pieces of what will become poems.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude at having been given the opportunity to do this work. this impossible work. this ever-shifting work of sifting out the truths that realities fabricate in the mind, to polish them until one can see through them again, that one truth—one idea—will in turn prism into many other truths, many ideas, many poems, many hours. the doing of this work is how one, singular, ephemeral life. . . can embody infinity.

now there is nothing left but the turning back. to give to this landscape the gifts of its distinction, its grace, its sensual imperatives, that it has given to me with such unknowing generosity. the other coastline on the other side of the pacific, soon.

there are many ways to give existence to something. but poetry—poetry is to not only the birth of something, but the making of space in the world for it. the alignment of what has come before and what will come after. the openings of its own world.