Where Sky and Sea Blend Seamlessly

Bridge of Lions - St. Augustine

Driving to St. Augustine

James Hart 

Driving north on highway A1A,
we feel the sky’s horizon brimming
songs of silent boom and silver spray,
hearing from inside our car the wings

of water ascending from shallow pools
we pass through on slick gray pavement.
These fleet inversions in the normal rules
of gravity tell us here are words meant

for us in times of silence and reflection,
how thunder’s rhapsody hides a prayer
falling now as heaven’s quick confession,
indiscernible in this rain and clothing air.

Distant sky and sea blend seamlessly,
lightning tongues in cloud mouth confessionals,
and here is Wordsworth and his tranquility
crashing beside us where the ocean swells

as I’m charged with faith I do not comprehend,
recollecting in this gray sturm and drang
a paradox of space and memory’s hinterland,
empires where my time is both flowing

on strands of history and lonely ebb tides
under stars. The sky hangs heavy north
of us like whales riding over ocean roads,
each of us in a melancholy, a belly’s worth

of thoughts wrapped up here inside this car,
our talk noting seagulls and brown pelicans
blooming beside us like some offshore flora,
surf rewriting shorelines into coastal Eden

as clouds crack and sunlight severs sky,
and here is St. Augustine over waveless strait
we cross by arcing bridges and relaxing sighs,
entering the city by its white lions’ gate.


(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)