Sunday Night

Tonight, after supper, and after T&S went home with the little girls, Lorraine and I drove out to Sailor’s Point. It has been a clear cool day with a fairly steady westerly to freshen your face and blue the sky, a day to go before sunset to do a little work with Lorraine’s new camera. Of course you can do that work almost anywhere, and you don’t have to be on the rocks by the sea to figure out how it works. But, like they say, why not? After all, it’s only about a three-minute drive and there are few things to compare with being on the rocks by the sea. So we went.

The wind was offshore, but the ocean swells were still rolling in and hitting the rocks in a steady procession, nothing spectacular, but still great to watch. A grebe was working about 20 or 30 metres out from shore, disappearing with its characteristic forward flop and coming up with slender fish that it maneuvered into the necessary swallowing position, and then going down for more. Lorraine set up the camera and together we read through some of the details in the manual to figure out some of the settings and things like aperture override and bracketing, while the swells kept sliding in and buffeting the rocks, sometimes crashing, sometimes splashing, and never stopping.

It was a great place to be as the sun dropped and illuminated the few drifts of clouds to the north and west. The sky was beautiful, but what I loved the most was the colours in the water, the slight peach reflection on the backs of the small waves heading offshore contrasting with the turquoise tinge of the sea.

It reminded of so many sunsets on or near the water, and of a poem, today’s poem, written by Denise Levertov in 1956. Though this poem is about sharks, and is tied together so beautifully throughout by its assonance, like in the closing lines, “Dark/the sharp lift of the fins”, it is the colour of the water, “the time/when a sheen of copper stills the sea,” that so often resonates with me at sunset, like it did tonight.

Here, after all that, is the poem:

Sharks

Well, then, the last day the sharks appeared.
Dark fins appear, innocent
as if in fair warning. The sea becomes
sinister, are they everywhere?
I tell you, they break six feet of water.
Isn’t it the same sea, and won’t we
play in it any more?
I liked it clear and not
too calm, enough waves
to fly in on. For the first time
I dared to swim out of my depth.
It was sundown when they came, the time
when a sheen of copper stills the sea,
not dark enough for moonlight, clear enough
to see them easily. Dark
the sharp lift of the fins.