Reflections of Beachcombers
Four Days in Grayland, Part IV

Poems, Quotations, Sayings
Beachcombing, Walking, Pacific Ocean, Sea Shore, Waves, Wind, Fishing, Fog, Clam Digging, Harbors, Bays, Beaches, Tides

Memories of Pacific Coast Places
Travels on US Highway 101 & 1
West Coast Snapshots & Snippets
Haiku, Short Poems, Photos, Quatrains
Graphics, Docu-Poems, Concrete Poems
By Michael P. Garofalo

"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind on the remembered earth, I believe.  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.  He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.  He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind.  He ought to recollect the glare of moon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."
-  N. Scott Momaday

"When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused."
-  Rainer Maria Rilke

"Waiting, watching, listening for the storm to reach the shore.
Swirling the waters cauldron; lifting the ocean floor.
Relocating and destroying - beachcombing aft the wind has blown.
Walk the sands of turmoil - collecting cuttlebone."
-  By Lindsay Laurie

"Stone Lagoon and sky
become one--
deepening fog." 
-   Michael P. Garofalo

“The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.”
-  Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"There are those to whom place is unimportant,
But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
Is important—
Where the hawks sway out into the wind,
Without a single wing beat,
And the eagles sail low over the fir trees,
And the gulls cry against the crows
In the curved harbors,
And the tide rises up against the grass
Nibbled by sheep and rabbits….
I sway outside myself
Into the darkening currents,
Into the small spillage of driftwood,
The waters swirling past the tiny headlands."
-  Theodore Roethke, The Rose, 1964

"Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war."
-  Loren Eiseley

"One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
‘Vain man,’ said she, ‘that dost in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise"
-  Edmund Spenser, Amoretti LXXV

"Limitless and immortal, the waters are the beginning and end of all things on earth."
-  Heinrich Zimmer 

"Iis a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility;
The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder—everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worship at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not."
-  William Wordsworth, Evening on Calais Beach

"Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing
the shoreline, not matter how many times it's sent away."
-  Sarah Kay

"The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in."
-  Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, 1860

“The more you get used to the calm of the harbor, the more alien the waves and realities of the sea become for you! 
You are looking for a safe harbor: The safest harbor is a well-functioning elaborative mind, because only such a mind
can find the best solutions to the most difficult problems.”  
-  Mehmet Murat Ildan

"I saw from the beach, when the morning was shining,
A bark o'er the waters move gloriously on;
I came when the sun o'er that beach was declining,
The bark was still there, but the waters were gone.

And such is the fate of our life's early promise,
So passing the spring-tide of joy we have known;
Each wave that we danced on at morning ebbs from us,
And leaves us, at eve, on the bleak shore alone.

Oh, who would not welcome that moment's returning
When passion first waked a new life through his frame,
And his soul, like the wood that grows precious in burning,
Gave out all its sweets to love's exquisite flame."
-  Thomas Moore

"The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the steep path between them.  The last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like sliversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal."
- Sylvia Plath, Blackberrying, 1961

"Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
-  Arnold J. Toynbee

"Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?"
-  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Time

“The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world.”
-  Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod

'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry.  It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song."
- Luanne Rice

"Louder than gulls the little children scream
Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam;
But others fearlessly rush in, breast high,
Laughing the salty water from their mouthes--
Heroes of the nursery.
The horny boatman, who has seen whales
And flying fishes, who has sailed as far
As Demerara and the Ivory Coast,
Will warn them, when they crowd to hear his tales,
That every ocean smells of tar."
-  Robert Frost, The Beach

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."
-  Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn

"The smell of the sea hugged the fog in the redwood trees,
All cool and dank, dimly lit and rank with green,
And in shadowed limbs the Stellar jays jabbered free,
And me, standing silently, an alien in this enchanted scene.

From behind the mossy grey stumps
the sounds of footsteps crunching fronds of ferns
caught my suddenly wary mind ...
What?

"Hello, old friend," said Chang San Feng.
"Master Chang, what a surprise," said I.
Master Chang sat on a stump, smiled, and said,

"Can you hear the Blue Dragon singing in the decaying tree;
Or is it the White Tiger roaring in the wilderness of your bright white skull?
No matter!  The answer is in the questioning; don't you Chan men see?
In the red ball flesh of this decaying tree
Sapless woody shards of centuries of seasons
Nourish the new roots of mindfulness sprouting. 
Yes, Yes, but how can it be?
The up-surging waves of life sprout forth from the decaying tree,
As sure as sunrise rolling over the deep black sea. 
Coming, coming, endlessly coming; waves of Chi. 
 

Tan Qian's raven roosts for 10,000 moons
     in the withered branches of the rotting tree;
     then, one day, the weathered tree falls,
     nobody hearing, soundlessly crashing
     on the forest floor, on some unknown noon. 
 

Over and over, over and over, life bringing death, death bringing life,
Beyond even the miraculous memories of an old Xian like me;
Watching, watching, sequestered from the strife,
Turning my soul away sometimes because I cannot bear to see. 

Even minds may die, but Mind is always free
Bounding beyond, beyond, far beyond you and me;
Somehow finding the Possibility Keys
And unlocking the Door out of the Voids of Eternities."

Master Chang somehow, someway,
slowly disappeared into the red brown heart of the decaying tree.

Then the squawk of the jay
opened my mind's eye to the new day -
Namaste." 
  
-  Michael P. Garofalo
   Remembering Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California
   April 27, 2012
   Meetings with Master Chang San Feng

“They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.”
-  Edward O. Wilson

"Follow the river and you will find the sea." 
A French proverb

“I'm so alive. As I stand facing the beauty of the never-ending Pacific Ocean, a late afternoon breeze blows down from the hills behind. As always, it is a beautiful day. The sun is making its final descent. The magic is about to begin. The skies are ready to burn with brilliance, as it turns from a soft blue to a bright orange. Looking towards the West, I stare in awe at the hypnotic power of the waves. A giant curl begins to take form, then breaks
with a thundering clap as it crashes on the shore.”
-  Dave Pelzer

"In steeps and sighs,
The ocean explains itself, backing and filling
What spaces it can't avoid, spaces
In black shoes, their hands clasped, the eyes teared at the edges:
We watch from the high hillside,
The ocean swelling and flattening, the space
Filling and emptying, horizon blade
Flashing the afternoon sun.

The dead are constant in
The white lips of the sea.
Over and over, through clenched teeth, they tell
Their story, the story each knows by heart:
Remember me, speak my name.
When the moon tugs at my sleeve,
When the body of water is raised and becomes the body of light,
Remember me, speak my name."
- Charles Wright, Homage to Paul Cezanne, 1977

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”
-  Raymond Chandler

"At the sea shore you pick up a pebble, fashioned after a law of nature, in the exact form that best resists pressure, and worn as smooth as glass. It is so perfect that you take it as a keepsake. But could you know its history from the time when a rough fragment of rock fell from the overhanging cliff into the sea, to be taken possession of by the under currents, and dragged from one ocean to another, perhaps around the world, for a hundred years, until in reduced and perfect form it was cast upon the beach as you find it, you would have a fit illustration of what many principles, now in familiar use, have endured, thus tried, tortured and fashioned during the ages."
-  Joseph Neilson

"She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore,
The shells she sells are sea-shells, I’m sure
For if she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore
Then I’m sure she sells sea-shore shells."
-  Mary Anning

"It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist."
-  Elizabeth Bishop, The End of March 

"Here all night on the dunes
In the rocking wind we sleep,
Watched by sentry stars,
Lulled by the drone of the deep.

Till hark, in the chill of the dawn
A field lark wakes and cries,
And over the floor of the sea
We watch the round sun rise.

The world is washed once more
In a tide of purple and gold,
And the heart of the land is filled
With desires and dreams untold.
-  Bliss Carman, On the Dunes

“Beauty can be found, in a fog of uncertainty.”
-  Marivee Bejar

"The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul."
-  Robert Wyland

"Only the idea of self remains
Floating on a sea of cells;
Only heartbeats short of eternity
In breath after breath we dwell."
-  Michael P. Garofalo

"In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth."
-  Rachel Carson 

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
– William Arthur Ward

"I would be enthralled at the stories the ocean could tell,
about explorers and adventurers that traversed its swell,
of the lives lost in shipwrecks and of pirate tales of old,
and legends passed down through generations, told.

The ocean is mysterious, enchanting us all,
and contains many strange creatures both large and small,
a vast body of water, we challenge with our might,
sail our boats across, battle it by day and by night.

It changes character, furious brooding one minute,
next it is calm and serene, then we can overcome and win it!
But when I see its rolling, crashing waves,
I am glad I am on terra firma, as it's stability I crave!"
-  Laura J. Sanders
 

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than those you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-  Mark Twain

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
-  Anthony Doerr

"To dance at the Still Point of the time beyond Time,
Beyond pasts, within futures, this Moment
Now and forever, beyond minds.
Not knowing of Who or Why
We stroll on sand dunes, and Love,
Precious flowers in the sky."
-  Michael P. Garofalo, Above the Fog 

"A fog drifts in, the heavy laden
Cold white ghost of the sea—
One by one the hills go out,
The road and the pepper-tree.

I watch the fog float in at the window
With the whole world gone blind,
Everything, even my longing, drowses,
Even the thoughts in my mind.

I put my head on my hands before me,
There is nothing left to be done or said,
There is nothing to hope for, I am tired,
And heavy as the dead."
-  Sara Teasdale

"Waves are the voices of tides.  Tides are life."
-  Tamora Pierce

"Perhaps not to be is to be without your being,
without your going, that cuts noon light
like a blue flower, without your passing
later through fog and stones,"
...
-  Pablo Neruda 

All day long in fog and wind,
The waves have flung their beating crests
Against the palisades of adamant.
    My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago,
    Curls of brown were slipping underneath his cap,
    He looked at me from blue and steely eyes;
    Natty, straight and true, he stepped away,
    My boy, he went to sea.
All day long in fog and wind,
The waves have flung their beating crests
Against the palisades of adamant.
-  Carl Sandburg

"The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward town,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
     And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
    And the tide rises, the tide falls."
-  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, 1850

"The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking."
- Carl Sandburg

"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open,
choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea." 
-  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"I often wander on the beach
Where once, so brown of limb,
The biting air, the roaring surf
Summoned me to swim.

I see my old abundant youth
Where combers lean and spill,
And though I taste the foam no more
Other swimmers will.

Oh, good exultant strength to meet
The arching wall of green,
To break the crystal, swirl, emerge
Dripping, taut, and clean.

To climb the moving hilly blue,
To dive in ecstasy
And feel the salty chill embrace
Arm and rib and knee.

What brave and vanished laughter then
And tingling thighs to run,
What warm and comfortable sands
Dreaming in the sun.

The crumbling water spreads in snow,
The surf is hissing still,
And though I kiss the salt no more
Other swimmers will."
-  Christopher Morley, The Old Swimmer

"Early in the day it was whispered that we should sail in a boat,
only thou and I, and never a soul in the world would know of this our
pilgrimage to no country and to no end.

In that shoreless ocean,
at thy silently listening smile my songs would swell in melodies,
free as waves, free from all bondage of words.

Is the time not come yet?
Are there works still to do?
Lo, the evening has come down upon the shore
and in the fading light the seabirds come flying to their nests.

Who knows when the chains will be off,
and the boat, like the last glimmer of sunset,
vanish into the night?"
-  Rabindranath Tagore, Sail Away

“Our mind is like a beach: Sometimes sunny, sometimes wavy, sometimes crowded, sometimes empty and lonely; at times stormy, at nights, cold and windy; in the mornings, very clear; at twilight, foggy! Our mind is like a beach, changing from one moment to another!”
-  Mehmet Murat ildan

"The peach hue of the darkening sky,
Fades into the cobalt blue of twilight.
A million dancing sunbeams,
Kiss the frothy waters of the deepening sea.
Cold stones, washed by a thousand drops,
Stand by to wait the breaking of the night.
Thinning wisps of lacy clouds,
Hide the advent of the stars.
Whirling waters draw together,
The canopy of heaven,
And the carpet of the earth."
-  Tommy McPherson, Seaside Sunset

"Dreamy, distant shores beckon my wistful, weary soul,
too long have I dwelt in limbo at the water's edge
afeared of the murky depths, of what lies beneath,
knowing that salvation lies beyond the ebb and flow of the tide,
needing to wade a little deeper, as with each day I die a little more.

The lapping, lathery tongue tempts me with its tender touch
yet, should I brave the cruel charybdis* before me
only to flounder and drown in the darkened abyss below?
Or will soothing sirens guide me to a sanctuary beyond the horizon?
How I yearn to swim in life's ocean once more, to feel its pull !

Looking across the ocean swells, I see a blazing beacon
casting its path, stretching to my feet, giving me courage,
the first tentative step is the hardest, but with each I feel my spirit surge,
joyously it soars as I run, the far distant land growing nearer,
and a voice inside whispers,''have courage, there is hope ahead '',
                                                for
''You can't cross the sea by merely by standing and staring at the water."
- Stellina

"These wet rocks where the tide has been,
Barnacled white and weeded brown
And slimed beneath to a beautiful green,
These wet rocks where the tide went down
Will show again when the tide is high
Faint and perilous, far from shore,
No place to dream, but a place to die--
The bottom of the sea once more.
There was a child that wandered through
A giant's empty house all day--
House full of wonderful things and new,
But no fit place for a child to play."
-  Edna St. Vincent Millay

"I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – upon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Bodice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too …"
-  Emily Dickinson

"To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude."
-  Jeanne Moreau 

"At the beach, life is different.  Time doesn't move hour to hour but mood to moment. 
We live by the currents, plan by the tides, and follow the sun."
-  Sandy Gringas

"The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
                                              The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
                                        The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell."
-  T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

Beach Quotes

"The beach to me is a sacred zone between the earth and the sea, one of those in-between between places where transitions can be experienced ─ where endings can be mourned and beginnings birthed.  A walk along the beach offers the gift of the unexpected."
-  Joan Anderson

"The Ocean has its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none.

The awful spirits of the deep
Hold their communion there;
And there are those for whom we weep,
The young, the bright, the fair.

Calmly the wearied seamen rest
Beneath their own blue sea.
The ocean solitudes are blest,
For there is purity.

The earth has guilt, the earth has care,
Unquiet are its graves;
But peaceful sleep is ever there,
Beneath the dark blue waves."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Ocean

“Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Hast thou been known to sing,
O sea, that knowest thy strength?
Hast thou been known to sing?
Thy voice, can it rejoice?
Naught save great sorrowing,
To me, thy sounds incessant
Do express, naught save great sorrowing.
Thy lips, they daily kiss the sand,
In wanton mockery.
Deep in thine awful heart
Thou dost not love the land.
Thou dost not love the land.
O sea, that knowest thy strength.

These sands, these listless, helpless,
Sun-gold sands, I’ll play with these,
Or crush them in my white-fanged hands
For leagues, to please
The thing in me that is the Sea,
Intangible, untamed,
Untamed and wild,
And wild and weird and strong!"
-  Effie Lee Newsome

"Monday I found a boot-
Rust and salt leather.
I gave it back to the sea, to dance in.

Tuesday a spar of timer worth thirty bob.
Next winter
It will be a chair, a coffin, a bed.

Wednesday a half can of Swedish spirits.
I tilted my head.
The shore was cold with mermaids and angels.

Thursday I got nothing, seaweed,
A whale bone,
Wet feet and a loud cough.

Friday I held a seaman's skull,
Sand spilling from it
The way time is told on kirkyard stones.

Saturday a barrel of sodden oranges.
A Spanish ship
Was wrecked last month at The Kame.

Sunday, for fear of the elders,
I sit on my bum.
What's heaven?  A sea chest with a thousand gold coins."
-  George MacKay Brown

Memories of Pacific Coast Places

"Exploring Willapa Bay today,
From Tokeland Marina to Raymond's river beds that stray,
And huge stacks of Douglas Firs waiting to be cut up a dozen ways;
To South Bend's grassy sloughs, piles of shelled oysters white and grey,
To the cliffs and river near Bay Center’s docks, where oystermen work away. 
Memories of this Pacific Sea and my septuagenarian life swell up today:  

Our photograph of the young surfer remains in hand, long after the teen has become a man.
The razor clams sucked the food from the foaming sand, for ten million years following an identical plan.
At low tide the muddy Willapa Bay, scary like quicksand, keeps me away. 
A dead whale in the sand near Orick rots, the carrion birds eat and happily squawk. 
The Baja beachlands baked bone hard dry, from the endless summer sun on high. 

I listen to the sounds of the surf from the shell over my ear, the sea so far and yet so near. 
I rest by my simple yurt by the sea, and light a campfire at dawn and just be. 
I used to smoke, now I don't, stopped making my weary lungs cough and choke.
I body-surfed till tired and cold, and ended it at age 50, just too damn old.
My memories of the ocean will hang on, long after my few big footprints 0n the wet dirt trail are gone.

Lots of fishing but no catching, so the old diner's dinner menu was very fetching. 
The high tide left a flotsam line, and I walked along and picked up a lovely agate find.  
The crowds are all gone in winter, and the incoming driftwood piles up and splinters.
Tsunamis ready to unroll from the offshore Cascadia earthquake zone, that indeed could
   erase hundreds of homes. 
Summer kites in Lincoln City, crowds galore, sunburnt children playing at the shore.    
The lingcod fed around the breakwater rocks, avoiding our hooks in the seaweed’s tangled locks. 
Fishermen at the pier, baiting their hooks, waiting, waiting, baiting, staring at the sea swells, waiting. 

The Dharma Bums at Big Sur are gone, a few clever word-smiths of drunken sad hip rambling songs.
“All life is suffering!” so some Zen men say; but I’m an Epicurean anyway:
   Find ways to suffer less and enjoy more Today. 
Esalen hot tubs and philosopher’s seminars at the edge of the sea, and the smell of cannabis in the breeze.
In a San Diego hillside temple Paramahansa Yogananda preached for one’s realized being,
   bowing in Child’s Pose and clearly seeing.
The high Santa Barbara Mission walls gleam white in the sun, and the priest raises the Host of the Son. 
In a stone house by the Sur shore, Robinson Jefferson lamented the presence of mankind and more.
The Beatnicks in Venice still laugh and listen, mixed with Yuppies and Hippies and musclemen.
San Francisco still hugs the hills, and the Golden Gate’s Bridge whistling moan has been stilled.
I walked to the beach from the Green Gulch Zen Farm, thinking of Alan Watt’s reminders and alarms. 
In McKinleyville, playing under the gray clouds from the sea, Grandmaster Yang Jwing Ming enjoys his Tai Chi. 
The surf fisherman released the fat pregnant surf perch, a considerate donation to the Fertility Church.   

At the gaping Mouth of the Columbia, stands Astoria, dank and old, with harbor seals
   barking loud on the docks so cold.
Chinooks and Chelais Peoples once camped near the Grayland strand, diseases erased them all from this land.
Eureka Bay, wasting away in the plywood papermills’ scum with the old nuclear plant’s abandoned concrete core
   sort of undone.
Whether in Oakland or Tacoma, ports so busy, docks unloading, 24 hour bustling cities.   
The Quinault River flows to the sea, through a rain forest Olympic born, so very very green as far as you can see. 
Grays Harbor for a change is in clear skied sun, fishing boats hustle to get into the King Salmon fall run.
Coos Bay darkened in the fierce wind and rain; while the Indian Casino was bright and gay,
   slot machines running night and day. 
Quiet Brooking, a humble seaside place, with the Pelican Bay Prison nearby locking up
   the worst of the human race. 
Malibu beach surfers wait for the best right swell, then launch for a long ride feeling so damn well.
My brother lives in Carlsbad, high above the sea; he walks slowly below the crumbling cliffs
   feeling somewhat free. 
Taking the Gold’s Beach power boat ride up the Rogue, spinning and splashing and speeding along;
   nevertheless, it seem like somethings wrong.   
From the dark depths of Monterey Bay, two whales came up by our boat to breathe one day. 
   
A pelican rested on a Westport dock post, looking for a feathered lover or
   a run of the eulachon smelt that he liked the most. 
All alone with the roaring surf, and hungry sea gulls gathering close on nearby turf. 
A tin of Ekone smoked oysters and French bread for lunch today, and a coffee latte to let my palette play.  
I looked at more pictures of the Pacific, my inner feelings plotted against external criteria, trying to be specific. 
The redwood groves soaked up the fog, intertwining their octopus roots for centuries, confident of a long slog.   

Flocks of birds fill the Spring sky, and that some salmon are not running up the John’s River is
   a tricky fisherman’s little lie. 
Dip netting for crabs from the Westport pier, the harbor waters were strangely clear.
More fir tree trunks were piled around the Aberdeen mills, cut daily from the distant lush Willapa Hills.
The Bandon cranberry bogs are fruitless now, but my Ocean Spray juice cup carries their essence anyhow.  
The sand dunes near Cape Kiwanda, Florence or Pismo still creep up and down with the wind;
   ORVing on them seems to me a sin.
The tides and long swells are the epic poem, the waves are the rhymes, images, and metaphors chosen. 
Hecate Head tide pools unflooding slowly: limpets, mussels, chitons, anemones,
   urchins, even crabs revealed – a scene that’s holy.      
The mammoth winter surf at the Mavericks at Monterey or at Shore Acres near Coos Bay,
   both scare the shit out of anyone in their crushing crashing way.   

L.A. is sandwiched between the Palos Verdes cliffs and Mt. Baldy’s stones, for 50 years it was my home.
On Ventura Highway, over the haunted Hotel California, just one eagle flies alone. 
My mom loved Carpenteria, and she held our hands tight, as we walked together in the starry 1950 night.
San Onofre’s concrete beehive nuclear dome is locked tight, a memento to ideas not yet right. 
Navy destroyers in the San Diego docks are loading tonight, sailor’s readying for a fight.
The Capistrano swallows return, again and again, a sure as the sun creates seasons for women and men. 
The tourists at the two Newports, one north one south, watch the slow yachts moving about.
Seattle’s high-tech millions make Puget Sound home, settled uneasy at the base of Ranier’ snowy dome. 
U.S.Highway 101, El Camino Real, from border to border, carrying trade and traveler’s under a funded Federal order. 
Three impressive Pacific States in a row, where I’ve lived so long and watched them unceasingly grow. 

The Café by the Edge of the Sea is hidden faraway, somewhere on the lonely south shore of Tillamook Bay. 
The Bolsa Chica tin-can beach years ago was cleaned, but now the smell of oil stinks up the scene.
The Huntington long pier was swept asunder, yet rebuilt again and again, despite the costly numbers.
Our sunburnt hands from Laguna once stung and blistered, decades later skin cancer took her sister. 
The glass beach at Fort Bragg glistens at dusk, the remnants of a trash dump, just broken colored husks. 
We watched the whales from that Port Orford cliffside café, eating oatmeal and berries to start the day.
The smells of myrtlewood from the foggy seaside canyons still linger, as I twist their dried leaves in my fingers.    

Yes, I’ve heard the Memaloose Ghosts in the Sitka swamps all talking, and I also left quickly in fear fast walking.
I dreamt of skulls and skeletons, graveyards of broken canoes, Islands of the Dead,
   creepy Clatsop Chinook stories in my head. 
In the Nehalem rain, with a deep dark dripping forest all around,
   a Memaloose Spook spoke to me with whispered words:

‘The tide comes in, the tide goes out, that’s the essence of what It’s All About.
Your tide flows out, old man, so best now to smile and shout and stroll bravely out.” 

 -  Michael P. Garofalo, Memories of Pacific Coast Places, 5/26/2022

"My fingers touch the cool, firm sand,
They let it sift between them, lovingly.
The little waves, with rhythmic melody,
Hush, and whisper, and break forth in gentle song,
As they plash in and out;
As each recedes, the uncovered beach
Is quickened with a life from out the west,
And--like the dew drops on the faery webs
That breathe with color in the early morn--
Each moment it receives the warm caress
Of that far, radiant space beyond the sea,
And, shimmering momently, gives back
A quiet answer, with a flush
Of soft dream fire."
- Katherine Taylor  

"The beach is truly home, its broad expanse of sand as welcoming as a mother's open arms. What's more, this landscape,
which extends as far as the eye can see, always reminds me of possibility."
-  Joan Anderson

"In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth."
- Rachel Carson 

"Up from the dark the moon begins to creep;
And now a pallid, haggard face lifts she
Above the water-line: thus from the deep
A drowned body rises solemnly."
-  Thomas B. Aldrich, Moonrise at Sea

"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are
more beautiful if they are few."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,
The crowd’s good laughter, the loved eyes of men,
I am drawn nightward; I must turn again
Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,
There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown
The old unquiet ocean. All the shade
Is rife with magic and movement. I stray alone
Here on the edge of silence, half afraid

Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me
The sullen waters swell towards the moon,
And all my tides set seaward.
From inland
Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,
That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea."
-  Rupert Brooke, Seaside

"If there is a heaven for me, I'm sure it has the beach attached to it."
-  Jimmy Buffet

"The beach of life can be anything and everything from tranquil, calm, sunny, peaceful,
and magically wonderful to gray, overcast, turbulent, roller-coastery, or stormy."
-  Barbara Legan

"I saw the long line of the vacant shore,
The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand,
And the brown rocks left bare on every hand,
As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
Then heard I, more distinctly than before,
The ocean breathe and its great breast expand,
And hurrying came on the defenceless land
The insurgent waters with tumultuous roar.
All thought and feeling and desire, I said,
Love, laughter, and the exultant joy of song
Have ebbed from me forever! Suddenly o’er me
They swept again from their deep ocean bed,
And in a tumult of delight, and strong
As youth, and beautiful as youth, upbore me."
-  Henry Wadsworth Longellow, The Tides, 1865

"A beach is not only a sweep of sand, but shells of sea creatures, the sea glass, the seaweed,
the incongruous objects washed up by the ocean. 
-  Henry Grunwald

"To escape and sit quietly on the beach - that's my idea of paradise.
-  Emilia Wickstead

"The sea has now changed from it's natural, to river coloured water, the probable consequence of some
streams falling into the bay, or into the ocean to the north of it, through the low land."
-  George Vancouver
 

"The three great elemental sounds of nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in the woods,
and the sound of the ocean outside on a beach."
-  Henry Beston

"All knowledge and understanding of the Universe was no more than playing with stones and shells on the
seashore of the vast imponderable ocean of truth."
-  Isaac Newton
 

"Landward the breakers roll and run,
The gray-white ospreys near and flee,
Beneath the long slant winter sun
Beside the winter sea.

With chilly gleam the shingle shines;
The sand with icy umber glows;
Back from the beach the stunted pines
Stand somber in the snows.

The horizon shows a steely glint,--
A line of pickets white patrolled;
The empty zenith holds the hint
Of cruelty and cold.

The north-wind clarions; 'tis a dirge,
A requiem, a threnody,
Keyed to the sad sound of the surge
Beside the winter sea."
-  Clinton Scollard

"wade
through black jade.
    of the crow-blue musssel shells, one keeps
    adjusting the ash heaps:
         open and shutting itself like

an
injured fan
    The barnacles which encrust the side
    of the wave, cannot hide
         there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
    glass, move themselves with spotlike swiftness
    into the crevices─
         in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
     of bodies.  The water drives a wedge
     or iron through the iron edge
          of the cliff, whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink-
      bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
      lillies, and submarine
           toadstools, slide each on the other." ...
-  Marianne Moore, The Fish, 1935

"O patient shore, that cans't not go to meet
Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest
Thou all thy loneliness?  Art thou at rest,
When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet,
He turns away?  Know'st thou, however sweet
That other shore may be, that to thy breast
He must return?  And when in sterner test
He folds thee to a heart which does not beat,
Wraps thee in ice, and gives no smile, no kiss,
To break long wintry days, still dost thou miss
Naugth from thy trust?  Still, waiting, unfaltering
The higher, warmer waves which leap in spring?
O sweet, wise shore, to be so satisfied!
O heart, learn from the shore!  Love has a tide."
-  Helen Hunt Jackson, Tides
 

"From north to south, and south to north,
Up and down, all year round,
     moving around
     to and from
     for food, for mates, for warmth and sun:
the swallows at Capistrano,
the butterflies at Monterey,
the geese from Canada,
the whales from Vancouver Island,
the salmon from the North seas.
Traveler's all
    on the West Coast
    flyways and seaways;
    like clockwork on calendars,
    predictable, expected─
         treasured."

-  Michael P. Garofalo, The Butterflies are Back

"The same water—a different wave.
What matters is that it is a wave.
What matters is that the wave will return.
What matters is that it will always return different.
What matters most of all: however different the returning wave,
it will always return as a wave of the sea.
What is a wave? Composition and muscle.
The same goes for lyric poetry."
-  Marina Tsvetaeva, The Wave Always Returns

"Timeless sea breezes,
sea-wind of the night:
you come for no one;
if someone should wake,
he must be prepared
how to survive you.
Timeless sea breezes,
that for eons have
blown ancient rocks,
you are the purest space
coming from afar ...
Oh, how a fruit-bearing
fig tree feels your coming
high up in the moonlight."
-  Rainer Marie Rilke, Song of the Sea

"Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar."
-  Alfred Lord Tennyson, Crossing of the Bar

"Not shy as tree nymphs are said to be
not oak-dwelling, but Sitka spruce
never worry about leaves leaving and
not returning, like dawn-swept dreams.
With Artemis, we see unseen hands
hired to wrench Dudleya plants off their native
North Coast. Bluff lettuce, pale green
rosettes of fleshy leaves vermillion-tipped,
erects a stem and blooms with a cluster
of yellow flowers. Not abalone iridescent,
yet coveted, like a nymph by Pan.
Ancient wardens, we whisper suspicion into
ears ready to follow the trail of dirt.
Replanting like healing.
Don't believe in my existence, in dryads
or archer Artemis roaming forests and hills?
Believe the plunder. Tiny Dudleyas,
tall redwoods, poachers grab: it's what they do.
Spring: my home tree grows fingers of
bright needle-like leaves. I have been here eons.
Artemis too, watchful, unleaving."
-  Simona Carini, Dryads Live in Sitka Spruce

Fishermen
by a rocky shore,
winds blowing wildly,
in a boat unmoored--
such is our condition.
-   Saigyo, 1118 - 1190

"When the swallows come back to Capistrano
That's the day you promised to come back to me
When you whispered, "Farewell" in Capistrano
T'was the day the swallows flew out to the sea

All the mission bells will ring
The chapel choir will sing
The happiness you'll bring
Will live in my memory

When the swallows come back to Capistrano
That's the day I pray that you'll come back to me!"
-  Glen Miller Orchestra, When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano

Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo - Seaside Thoughts
 

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