shoreline into evening

shoreline into evening
whitianga, february 1990

Whitianga wharf, with acknowledgements for use of this image to the ‘Crows Nest Apartments’ website.

sunken into place
the sand again
where the sea loses
the rise beds it
down again.

the sea shortens
stride lifts itself
over breaks open
white from the
shallows upward.

the beach goes out
like the summer
into the dark
we curtain out
open the glass

thirty-eight

thirty eight 
october 1994, beijing

Shipwreck timbers in Nun Mill Bay cc-by-sa2.0 – © Walter Baxter – geograph.org.ukp3507664

eighteen
i wrote of my ‘unusual’ age
a wind blowing straight out
of the sunset into my eye
			into my heart
			a mood of the sea.

thirty-eight
 land-locked  on days
a clear sky falls to me
i remember the sea
i came from

how the sand’s shaped round
 beached timbers left

ribs  keel  of an old  s h  i     p
become a strangeness of the
				shore

Copyright © 2021 Peter Le Baige. All Rights Reserved

The music for the reading is from the ‘Largo’ movement of Cello Sonata Op. 40 (1934) by Dimiti Shostakovich, performed here by the composer himself on piano and Mstislav Rostropovich on cello.

chinese ink wash

chinese ink wash
june 2011, beijing

‘Old Trees, Level Distance’ by Guo Xi, China, Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), with acknowledgements to the website of Metropolitan Museum of Art for use of this image. 

gone over
twenty years
my father
is a chinese
ink wash
you might find
deep in a library
between covers
under tracing
paper or
hung at the
back of a chinese
grocery near the
waterfront above
the co. ltd. name
and calendar month
an ink wash
nothing clear about it
yet it draws you
in and onward
into those spaces,
not the lines that