Beauty

Note: yesterday's post ("There is still beauty,"), pulled from Timm's 1998 journal, reminded me of a poem I wrote in a while back on a similar theme.


BEAUTY

Let’s say that beauty
is an analogue for birth,
its washes a boat
for crossing water.

It is piano jazz on summer
afternoons, a curtain
flowing in a window.

Beauty is my wife’s
shape turned away as
she sleeps, curving
toward shores
where I wait for her.

It is our Siamese cat
staring out at late rains and
turning back to take me in
with blue so naked eyes.

Each encounter with beauty
ferries me toward its other,
older source. My mother’s
voice at 80 merges with
the one I heard at three
when she sang over the sea.

Night storms are ebbing through
this poem, dripping from
the eaves. I walk a long beach
toward first light,
alone on stilled, lush sand.

To find beauty is to conceive
our heart in the shape it
dreams, giving birth
to the sweetest part
of the day, a chapel of salt

yearning lifting love up
from clear blue waters
again and again again
till all sands
and hearts are clean.

Timm O'Cobhthaigh, "Sunset at Beverly Beach"