HEAD ON THE WATER

HEAD

There’s a head on the water. I see it

every morning and evening as I stand

on the beach’s frothy edge – the walrus-head

of a healthy human specimen between  

me and the motor-driven schooners moored 

in mid-harbour, their sails superfluous 

and furled; between the open sea

and the cactus-clustered mountains.

Between me on the hissing hem of froth

and the schooners’ supernumerary sails,

between the cliffs and the promenade I see

a regular middle-aged hominid head,

a brine-encompassed brainbox that proceeds

stealthily from my waking to my sleep,

its wet mouth lapped by whiskers, half-closed eyes

rapt in some indecipherable bliss.

A head that has made this incongruous

element its own, a head on its own 

that has made the sea its own, a head 

that I cannot get out of my own head,

moving without making sense between

the harbour mouth and the holiday apartments,

de facto as the cactus plants that rest

snug in their places on the mountain slopes.

I watch it daily from the ocean’s edge

shifting without a ripple or a wake

in the lagoon between a reef of yachts

and my reluctant water-testing toes,

I see it floating through recurrent dreams –

a king in a country of his own making,

capo di capi not to be discounted

in the fortunate isles of imagination.

A cranium building a head of steam

in its unwimpling progress up and down

the smoothness of the surface, unconcerned

by what is happening offshore or on.

This head of heads, no other head’s contentment,

content without companion head, ensconced

in isolated mindfulness. A head

to end all heads, the mother of all heads.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2012

Tenerife, January 2012