More on: sea

On my prow, the dove; / from my brow, every animal paired.

This silence before
love pulls itself
apart, against
the current of its own
longing, is the most terrible
silence I know.

IT SEEMS TO ME, who have never held a brush in my life except to dip it in a bucket of house paint, that a good reason to become a painter, aside from the enduring mystery of beauty, is to learn how to see. And painters do indeed spend an inordinate amount of time in…

The bay’s mouth swells, sucking the gale and spit into stone lungs, laying the ground for what the island tells, hoarsely: before the boats arrive, after the shops shut. Beach Sand shuffles amiably, like familiar words stroking and nosing one another, melismatic chant that slips and pours so quickly that you never see the razor…

the sea saying, This is how you pray to your rock of a god, your massive cliff of a god, sheer drop into the bay, immovable, not-going-anywhere kind of god. Look at photos from a hundred years ago. Your god’s not moved. Glacial remains of a god. Impenetrable. Can’t-wear-it- down god. Rock face of a…

Santa Rosalía de Mulegé Baja California 1820 THE COCHIMÍ SAY THE VIRGIN guards her pearls, and for that reason the church is never locked. The stone mission of Mulegé, perched upon red hills above the reach of estuarial floodwaters, had no doors to lock. The Indian workmen had not finished the carving. The church doorway…