Coffee Musings - 022707

I've been reading Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra, and I thought about the ocean which features prominently in this book of poems. For who knows how many years, I've thought as water as cleansing, as the ocean on it's waves as cleansing. It will remove the scars of the urban day, and dissolve them. I'm not thinking this to remove responsibility from people to pick up their trash after they leave. It's more like the ocean erases the footprints in the sand, the legacy that could be kept in stone, it keeps alive, and yet only as a memory . . . unless it's underneath. This would apply to any big body of water i.e., one of the 5 midwestern great lakes.

Underneath, though, as any treasure hunter would agree, the ocean preserves the mistakes. To look at the waves of an ocean, the skin of a human, the bark of a tree, we could see sickness that may only be on the surface, something that can be sloughed off or cleaned up. However, underneath the waves, or the skin, or the bark of a tree if the sickness, the shipwreck is beneath the layers of detection, then it is preserved, only moved by chance.

In this view, are the waves cleansing, is the ocean a cleansing agent, the salt scouring the surface, and the waves willing the debris away? It too, has it's secret stash, what it does not dissolve. Unlike fog though, if asked, it will reveal, and challenge at the same time.