Seapoint

I used to come here frequently to sit, think and tap at my laptop. With those visits in mind, I recently drafted this:

 
Seapoint
 
I often come to Seapoint to stare
at the sea, or, more accurately,
at a foreground or background detail
framed in my windscreen: bather stepping down
the stone slipway (called, I heard, Dead Man’s Slip
because a man once drowned there)
 
or at something on or above the surface, sunstruck
speck of a ferry, container or cruise ship
burning a hole in the horizon,
Howth Head sleeping-bagged in cloud or the clear-cut
diorama of moss-greens, grey-browns
tapering to the throb
 
of a lime-white light-house
duelling with the temporary evening star
of a plane making its final descent ––
or just sitting, thinking, knowing
the sea is parked out there
in the gap between the Martello tower
 
and the lifebelt mounted on poles
with a deposit box for dog-shit.
I’m sure some believe there is little point
in gazing at the sea
and any writing based on such lack of activity
would be entirely pointless.
 
Frost wrote that people sitting on the shore
cannot look out far
or in deep. He was partly right
though it depends on where your meaning sits
on that sea-saw, ‘far’
or ‘deep’. A glance flitting across
 
a room, to bounce off or dock
with another’s can be someone
pushing beyond suspended animation into wakeful
star travel. And perhaps there is no point
in saying that critics of sea-gazing
miss the point, which is
 
the sea’s levelling pointlessness,
its uneasy flatness which is a slap
in the faces of those who cultivate a suspicion
of metaphor, especially of the sea’s
self-consuming moulting of metaphors which are
and were always
 
both beside and precisely the point.