Transition

On certain days the ocean blooms
In godlike prisms,
Rainbows on the flume,
Glazing sun in mists;
The horizon crests
In combs and chasms,
Bores and spirals,
Troughs and drowning destiny,
Tumbling through sleep to land,
As what below us rests,
Rinsing in the lowly sea,
In barrels mixed of lime and sand—
Our lives in fact,
Our rising desperate tide,
The light itself,
All of summer’s fogged-in side—
Becomes at last a wave,
The running vapor of despair,
The washes of the grave
Transposed in time to air.