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Horizon
(Oil on canvas, 24" x 30")

Horizon

If you could simply walk into the scene,
to the end of the boardwalk, it would be
like walking into the end of the world,
into the embrace of what might be seen
as a happy ending; but the imagined
future is just the afterglow of day –
this day, in which you grow old and tired.
The peace you hope to find there
is really just the globe’s curve localized,
depicted as the view of one person, you,
looking out at the whole. And you see that
the sea’s boundaries are set – not that it
won’t rise as the icecaps melt, but set in
the way that hydrogen and oxygen are
necessarily combined, mixed with salt,
a finite quantity suggesting an infinity,
flattened by the attractive mass of Earth,
so that as you gaze you see a line where
ocean meets the sky, meetly, a fixing of
the horizontal that elicits your assent.

The clouds too are aftermath. Storms
have passed; the weather’s finding its
composure, breathing slowly. The night
will be achingly adorned with stars –
higher, purer, lovelier than all that you
can reach – and tomorrow you will face
once more the continued inquisition
of the sun, its demands and queries,
the slow degrading of your skin, its
contents, the ambivalence of noon.

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