New Year Poem

This beach was mine all spring.
I walked between one town and another,
possessing all I saw, dreaming the sea.
Now, in summer's midst, windy grey weather,
the shore planted with bottles, papers, cans,
and holidayers absorbed in cricket's charmed ritual,
or propped against the dunes, half watching …
Out there along that shifting line
where the greatest waves will break,
the surfers rock and wait. A split second
decides which wave to mount, and when.
In shining suits they veer and zigzag
along a turning edge, skate under waterfalls
or surface through them, standing
weightless on their boards. One speeds
into spray and wind, turns a full circle,
then merges with the wave as it is spent,
completing the curve of one ecstatic act.
Resolutions? In this new year I think
how little can be resolved, or carried through.
I can record only being here, at this point
in a process of making poems, a life,
out of fragments. I write, remembering
the cricketers in a wide ring, straddling
dry sand and wet; and a surfer taking
the power of a wave, topping, for one moment,
the horizon, then skidding back and down
towards the deep, before whiteness pounds.