An Intellectual Esthetic

• We watch, across the bay, the wash
• of white waves upon the rocks,
• and awareness of boredom keeps us,
• for we do not feel its beauty
• without effort. We tell each other
• the obvious, to make not it
• but our feeling of it
• more secure.
• Is love the substance on the cliff’s edge
• of the cypress swept back by the vastness?
• Is the fog which obscures the point romantic?
• At leisure, we struggle with leisure.
• We assert and struggle with assertions.
• Waters in deepening blueness
• and distance in its own mist
• don’t talk back.
• 1 July 1983 Mendocino