“The Beach House, Early Spring,” by Eric Robert Nolan

1.

For a moment,
we are outside of Time.
The long shore road before us,
graying in a wraith of fog,
is immemorial slate,
the fog the same fathomless iron
as the primeval cloak which once
crowned and veiled a world of only oceans.

We arrive “off season.”
The houses around the one that we’ve selected
hold only unlit windows.
Oblivious in their square and bare-roomed silences,
they are hewn at angles from a sandy landscape —
monoliths of dark apertures.

We invade our own.
You glow along the curve of the walk
like a slowly circling star.
A key rattles and we
explore the rooms in succession.
We are interlopers,
newly inhabiting each,
announced in electric light.
Your laughter enchants them
back to their habit of residence.

“Look at the size of it!” you yell,
tossing your pocket’s contents
upon the kitchen counter.
There your coins arrange —
planets in an accidental cosmos.

The gulf of the parlor yawns.
The sofas are motionless hills.
The hall is a valley lined with the caverns of rooms.
The kitchen is vast.
The kitchen is a vast canyon where dust has settled.

Only an old clock is in motion –
the slowly rolling, backlit iron
of its hour hand, its minute hand
in its indifferent face;
giddy with our sense of space,
we do not slow to notice it.

The fracture in the sliding glass door at the rear
is the fissure of an opaque glacier.
Together we draw the door
to greet to roar of our purpose, for
we wanted to see the sea.

2.

It bellows over all the dark dunes —
booming in pendulum rhythm
under immeasurable night.
But I only pull you to me.
For me, there is more allure
where ambrosial strands will greet your skin in graceful eddies —
the waves of your hair down your neck.
Even at this vastness of sea and sky,
the implacable, sheer and unending
Glower of Creation, I favor
your warming skin so longingly that
the Infinite would rear and roar in envy.

We rush out,
to salt and sweeping winds,
heedless under heedless stars,
to the dun high dunes like heaps of cretaceous remains,
then, through the shadow-burnished breach
in their slumbering dim ellipses,
to the paradox of every beach —
the sand’s coarse silicon still
softens all our darkened steps to silence.

Here Existence shouts
the very Bark of Providence.
The sea is a flat dimension
of slowly rolling, moonlit, coldly undulating irons,
lashing shore in endless duel,
and throbbing, epochal pulse.

Between stars of an unrivaled
hardness and brightness,
we discern within the black
one color poured to another,
blue which fills with voids of driving violet,
and the moon’s own rounded border,
burning gold on silver-opal circle.

I pull you to me.
We spill across the sand as eagerly as surf.
You are the very lighted moon upon my skin.
The heat in you is undiluted stars.
All of space recedes in salience beside
the fragrance of the space behind your ear.
And your breath’s accelerando
is greater than the cadence of tide.

We are alone.
We are as rhythmic as the unseeing
and boundless and indifferent sea.

3.

We escape the notice of stars as easily
as we laze to delineate them –
lying on our backs, the backcloth
of galaxies flush in front of us.

We are white and linking figures on the shore:
you are a lucent pearl, and I
a dim, wan shard of jagged, broken shell.
The pearl of you is shorn to sheen
by the pressures of your depths.
And I remember my life before you
as a conch will remember the ocean floor–
caliginous illusive dream.

My body finds your own again.
My thumb draws in to trace
your concave, shining oyster shell
of starlit open palm.
The contour of your wrist, in light,
is lustered spiral cerith under moon —
in shadow, is tawn of junonia.

I tell you the ocean is paradox –
fixed and ever moving …
or remorseless memory
by confabulation changed.
Caressing the warmth of your palm, I tell you,
the ocean is a clock.
The collisions of its tides
are our common metronome.

Kissing my inner wrist, you opine
the ocean is a poet —
ever keeping meter. And
you giggle that it never stops.

We pause.
Then we sit, in colloquy,
cross-legged, unobserved
under glittering galaxies in
incomprehensible distances.
And I ask you whether we matter.

Time is endless,
exceeding even circumference of
its slow and sliding clock of circling stars:
the North Star is its center;
the arms of constellations are
its hour hands, its minute hands;
the arcs of stars advance it, stars
number our moments together,
so slowly that we won’t notice,
unless we dwell to examine
their ponderous momentum.

I say more.
This time it’s physics.
I worry over a kind of
special relativity —
when time speeds up when we’re together, our
sated, stationary closeness, is it
our ardor dilating time?
In our glad adjacency,
lovers’ lives will therefore contract;
all of our moments are shrinking.

If so, then, Love, I give you
all of my dwindling moments.
I give you
all of my rapiding hours,
my blithe pilgrimage for your white form,
my quickening existence in this
salt and starlit air, with these
smooth stones and sounds of ebbing water —
the receding endless melee of sea —
this stillness and sensation,
this coast where sky reels faster now.

4.

I sleep. In dream, the tide
is embryonic rhythm.

I wake, and the moon is in a different place –
higher over us, its shimmering eye in chaperone,
or intent upon its mirror – the shine in the sand —
the eased and willowy silver of you,
your luminous integer.

You tell me, “You went away,
for a little while.”
I ask you how long but you only
point to the movement of moon.

Sleepily, I ask you if
the universe is so large that no god could ever
pity the infinitesimal.
The math of it leaves us abandoned.
We are each diminishing concepts
when the light years reach ever farther
in our abstract contemplations –
those cold and compassless lengths in space.
And no god could ever love us any more
than you and I could pause in our keenness to love
two random grains of sand upon this beach.

I measure the stars.
I confide in you that at times
I imagine them all empty.
In my mind I will search them all
finding neither mother, nor father,
nor friends and other poets fallen silent.
Like a child, I am learning only now
how to love a universe
that even in my reverie is soulless.

You pull me to you.
You draw your alabaster palm
to the roughening coral of my cheek.
Your arms are whitened driftwood.
Your legs are lettered olive shells.
And your eyes are as full and smooth and dark
as umber, nearly weightless sea glass.

You draw my face to yours,
and press your hand to mine.
You kiss me, and whisper solipsism:
that the universe is only us —
our perceptions.
We need only to close our eyes
to extinguish it all, on our own, in an instant, and then
reverse the extinction by blinking
them open again.

And if we shut our eyes together, our hands pressed, you tell me,
then we are all there is in Time and Space.
No distances exist between our palms —
only the actions of atoms,
and their electrons in hastening orbit,
excited at greater temperature,
moving faster in their warmed adjacency, as we are.
“Ask yourself if that is all there is, and it will be.”

My eyes are closed, but I can feel you smiling.
The tide reduces to silence,
as a slowing iron clock now winding down,
and the warmth of your open palm is enough
to soften all the universe.

I want to hold you, hold this moment,
outside of time, forever, outside
of the vastness pressing down us,
as we warm one another, adjacent,
lest eons align to suffuse our skin
or endlessness slide through our irises,
lest the Vacuum arrange in our veins,
or distances invade our bones.

My heart is neither calm nor song,
nor tender look, nor mildness,
nor summer, nor stillness
nor ode’s serene device.

For you – the hushed and stormless all of you –
my heart is a hungry universe.
My heart is the same vast,
unknowing insatiety
that with measureless abandon
reels when you distract from it.

And I will love you, Dear,
not only here,
not only until the end of my days;
I will love you past all that which is.
I will love you
outside of Time.

© Eric Robert Nolan 2023

Photo credit: Christian Ferrer, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons