Starting Out

It's after the get-together
outside the harbour café -
late sun on the promenade
from a flapping sky
full of gull-cries
and foam-flung slapping waves.

Your days are all early
at the sea's edge
where headlands reach out to sea
meeting the possible horizons.

But far out at sea
you'll come back to this -
a shoreline's brink and cling,
a harbour of hours
in the vast wave-breaking
basalt-black coast of time.

After the good-luck hand-shakes,
the blustery bon voyage,
you wander down the promenade
with swagger and saunter,
down the edge of the sea
under the goodbyes of gulls
and the crying close of broken waves.

And I sense your surging start-up,
your morning embarkations
and newness of forward footfalls -
to be good with going
alive to unseen journeys
on the cusp of things,
not yet arrived,
a saunterer and swaggerer
in the careless mystery of days.

From my middle-aged suburban maze,
in its clustered facsimile of houses,
in the no-way-out non-descript avenues -
I see you turn to go that day
facing the sea's ever-changing sea-winds,
intense with departure,
wayfaring my projected ocean.