Point Joe has teeth and has torn ships; it has fierce and solitary
beauty;
Walk there all day you shall see nothing that will not make part
of a poem.
I saw the spars and planks of shipwreck on the rocks, and beyond
the desolate
Sea-meadows rose the warped wind-bitten van of the pines, a
fog-bank vaulted
Forest and all, the flat sea-meadows at that time of year were
plated
Golden with the low flower called footsteps of the spring, millions
of flowerets,
Whose light suffused upward into the fog flooded its vault, we
wandered
Through a weird country where the light beat up from earthward,
and was golden.
One other moved there, an old Chinaman gathering seaweed
from the sea-rocks,
He brought it in his basket and spread it flat to dry on the edge of
the meadow.
Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally
Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always
present.
Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past
and future;
Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.
Man gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and
ocean,
On shores where better men have shipwrecked, under fog and
among flowers,
Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the
earth was only
A trick of nature's, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful
subtleties.
