by Anne Simpson

The sea is far below us, washing round,
a paler blue on shoals along the shore.
A bell. Again the buoy repeats the sound
of blame, and sand dissolves its shifting doors.
It meets what enters on the latest tide –
the century's debris, small bones of time –
here at the edge. Whatever we might hide
lies flat, exposed: sun bleaches our small crimes.
And still the meadow plunges to the blue
down slopes of grass and bramble, daisy reels.
So maybe nothing mars this postcard view
except what we invent, or what we feel
we've always known in this, the end of things:
the ocean closing round us in a ring.