Rough Weather

after Paul Martin (1896), ‘Rough weather at Hastings’

by Charles Byrne

The print’s residual iron salt,

diffused from the platinum paper,

has woven a coiling rusty constellation

on the black night of the album’s facing page.

And yet each platinum grain of the photograph

has stood fast, the white wave’s silent gelid curl,

arced hoarfrost of wave, the water’s beat of heart

against the numbed wall.

I picture the photographer sitting quietly,

ocean-sprayed, on the black rocks, next

to his room of a camera, while it waits for him.

The shout of sea makes a strange silence, evening

everything out, as he thinks of the time when the water

will have eroded the esplanade, sees it soften into the sea.

There is, he suspects, nothing that water

will not dissolve, given time.

Now I sit here myself more than a century later,

black-mooded, sitting in the grey of late afternoon

on the Channel, watching the light-traced clouds unlace evening.

Light evaporates slowly, like simmering water. The breezes

are preternaturally warm, even for summer. I scan the stone

of the esplanade, worn smooth, the loosening stitches

of the breakwaters. I think of when we’ve hung

our salt-streaked jackets in the hall, still plumy

with the ocean, when we’ve seen the last

shearwater wane, seen what our children

will not – what we will have to explain

to them, and how.

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Charles Byrne is a writer, teacher, and trained environmental scientist in San Francisco with poems recently published or forthcoming in Meridian, New American Writing, and Notre Dame Review. He has read submissions for RHINO poetry journal and Autumn House Press.