The tide pulls out and leaves the pile exposed.
Salt whitens in the grain like ancient frost.
I press my thumb against the weathered ridge
And feel the rings, each year a narrow band,
The pale of spring, the dark of summer drought,
Laid down in cambium before the saw.
Some creosote still sweetens in the knots,
A smell of pitch that outlasts every rain.
The wash would take it grain by grain; I stand
Between the ebbing water and the wood,
And I would gather what the salt has left,
The barnacle’s white crater, the green hair
Of weed that dries to paper on the beam,
And fold them in the mind, where nothing drowns.
Let every ring be counted and kept whole;
The ebb will not return what it has worn.
So take the salt, the pitch, the ring, the grain,
And seal them while the thing itself is here.

You think to lock the ocean in a vault
And call the dried and stiffened fiber saved.
The salt you press into your keeping mind
Is only brine that could not follow back
The long retreat and falling of the bay.
The post was never anchored for a shrine;
It stands to meet the scour, to take the grit,
And let the boring worm hollow the heart
Until the channeled cellulose gives way.
What rots is not diminished by the drift;
The current gives the shape it wears away,
And every ring you number in the dark
Was laid in water, fed by rain and soil,
To pass through water into sand again.
To seal the pitch is merely fear of loss,
A taxidermy of the severed trunk.
The weed that dries to paper on the balk
Is dead because you will not let it drown:
Release the grain, and let the channel clear.

You say the post was never made a shrine.
No shrine is asked. I ask for what is here.
The current gives no shape; it only wears,
And what it wears is lost, not given on.
The weed went dry in air, not kept from tide;
You blame my keeping for a death the sun
Had done before my hand had touched the beam.
The rings were set in forest, not in brine;
They cannot be returned to any sand
Once worm and salt have hollowed out the heart.
A pale band, then a dark: one year, one drought,
Is legible today, and then is silt.
You call that count a taxidermy. No:
A stuffed thing mimics life; the count is true.
It adds no flesh; it holds the thing that was.
The ebb is loss. I will not call it gain.
So let the pitch be named while it still smells,
Then hold the ring before the ring is gone.

The count you trust is taken on a wound.
The saw that severed cambium from root
Brought down the tree to make a mooring post,
And now you praise the timber for its scars.
The ring was never printed for the thumb;
It grew by cell and sap, and dried in air,
A brittle residue of seasons dead.
To name the dark band drought, the wide band rain,
Recovers neither summer to the wood.
The wood is unconcerned with what was lost;
It takes the salt, the grit, the boring worm,
Not out of patience, nor to teach a law,
But by the friction of colliding things.
The tide recedes; the timber bleeds its pitch;
The sun bakes white the crystals in the crack.
No grain remains identical an hour:
The water pulls the outer fiber loose,
And what you count is washing into foam
Before your numbering has dried its ink.

The saw was cruel. I grant the wound is real.
But cut wood shows the year it would have hid:
The ring was never printed for the thumb,
And yet it prints the thumb with all its drought.
You say the count recovers not the summer.
No count was sold as summer. It is trace,
And trace is what the hungry foam leaves out.
You say the grain is changing as I read.
Then read it faster, closer, while it holds.
The pitch still bleeds; I smell it. That is mine.
Your friction took the pitch and gave no name;
The crystal in the crack will leave no word
Of what it whitened or what grew beneath.
A mind that watches loss without a mark
Has only joined the loss and called it wise.
The ink may dry, but ink has dried on worse
And lasted past the hand that wrote it down.
I hold the ring against the ebbing tide.
The foam can have the rest. It cannot have this.

You yield the timber, yet you claim the print,
As if the thumb were carved of harder stone
Than what the sea grinds down to form the bar.
The ink you trust will yellow in the salt;
The page itself is crushed and dried-out reed,
No safer from the damp than rotting pine.
You call it wisdom merely to drown dumb,
Yet raise an unsealed barrier against the tide
And name the silt your monument and home.
The river does not turn for any hand.
All matter turns to fire, and fire to ash;
Each form transforms by dying into state,
And none endures by freezing on the bank.
The pitch you smell is vapor in the wind,
Diffusing into noon before the swell
Returns to claim the footing of the pier.
The flood sweeps clear of memory and trace:
It takes the balk, the salt, the drying weed,
And washes thumb and number out to sea.