Title: Spock's Dream: Built on the Sand
Author: Jane (jat_sapphire)
Contact: jat_sapphire@yahoo.com
Series: TOS
Rating: G
Type: poem
Codes: K/S implied, character death implied
Summary: After Kirk's death, Spock lives on Earth for a time, stays on the sea-side, and grieves.Disclaimer: Except for this heading, there's no explicit mention of copyrighted material, but the characters of Kirk and Spock belong to Paramount. Please don't sue me.
Thanks to IslaofHope and Rabblersr who read this before I posted it and helped me with the title. The first draft of this poem was written in about 1980, so I'm glad to get it out of my files and doing something, hopefully, useful.
Built on the Sand
Learning to swim one June,
I had sand in my teeth for a week,
and after the surf everything
tasted sweet. I thought
it would last.
Now
noon heat drives me
helpless as mercury, up
wave-sculpted rocks. I look down
and out of glassy stagnation my own face
looks back, limpets lying
in my reflected eyes.I built the house I sleep in,
mortared it firm, dug piles in the sand
deeper than graves, to hold it, and then walls
against the moving dunes that steal
my garden.
But when
twilight weaves sea to sky, birds
silent as beads on its threads, I am caught
in dark's web: my house and garden and sand
dissolve like the dreams I am learning
to forget. Are night visions
my creatures too? Stars
blinking only in the little caves
of my eyes?I wake before dawn, my window
starred black with frost, and remember
how in a similar dream I got up and walked
again on the shore. Pelicans in their nests
cried and the spotted sky pushed its nails
into my skin, as fish driven in Spring
crush to the narrows and die.
Waves bayed
and threw themselves at the shore.
As one crouched to leap I saw its prey:
a huddled form in white robes, curled
in a hollow of rock. I called,
"I would have come--
would have come sooner if I could!" He
turned his slow face, shadowed
like bone: "You are not
the one I wait for."That one has married the sea beyond the sea,
swims in ripples and tides without measure, pure
as the ring he never had to wear.
He races leviathans now, flies
like chimes on the wind.
No I am not,
nor could ever be
that creature of depths.How can the water shine
under the moon that cuts it into waves
with a silver knife, and what is it that dances
bobbing on the foam? I pull a slender
but cutting thread:
nothing follows.No fish on the line,
rocks bare on the shore,
dirty nests but no birds. I listen, but
the surf that spoke in his veins
is silent in mine.