and evening spreads its emptiness
across the parking lots, I begin
to understand what you have always known:
that we are not ready for what we are.
The surfers emerge from the waves
like thoughts from deep sleep,
carrying their boards like questions.
Who can say what the seagulls circle for?
Their hunger is older than our seeking.
They descend on what remains
when all our words have failed.
The waves do not arrive or leave.
They are the gesture of something
that has always been here,
that we, in our fullness, cannot see.
Night comes to the coast like breath—
so simple, so terribly simple.
The dunes hold no prophecy,
the motels shelter no truth.
And still we build our wharves
into the darkness, believing
something must be gained. As if
emptiness were not already complete.
This is what the buzzards missed:
there was never anything to find.
The sea enters and leaves us
like time through an empty room.
And so we stand at the edge of night,
where all our certainties dissolve.
The darkness comes not as an ending,
but as the truth we’ve always known:
that we are this too—this vast absence,
this emptiness that holds the stars.
That we have always been nothing
but the space where light parts from itself.
Written in Santa Cruz, California, on January 18, by Cornelius Climatus.
Copyright @Cornelius Climatus, 2025.