Unfinished music

     for Hugh

All day I’ve been following your clearest lines:
walked within easy earshot of the sea,
though I sit at my desk inland, and hardly move at all.

So often you’ve walked the beach at Scarborough,
listening for the sea’s many voices,
that by now you conjure them effortlessly:

voices of drowned sailors; echoes
of spent empires, their arrogance
scattered for all to see; the separation
of lovers, of parents and children; and always
those long, empty beaches, for us to walk
down, down through the seven ages to oblivion.

And you, choosing not to be overwhelmed
by that grand chorus, learned instead
to fasten your mind to each shifting

detail; to pare down language
to its essentials:
everything you saw and heard reassembled
into digestible fragments
of the great, unwritten script –

seventeen syllables summoning, again and again,
hints of bird-calls, salt spray,
ascetic silence, and the silence
after lust and its merciful quenching.

Dear friend, I’m sorry that time
always returns; that in the end
there has to come an end to exploration.
Meanwhile no rock, no bird, no grain of sand,
no gesture of yours or mine
is identical to any other;
each one a fragment
of that great music you still hear
and channel, which must of course
remain forever unfinished.

 - Jacques Coetzee