Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

Bill O'Reilly: I'll tell you why it's not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in…
David Silverman: Tide goes in, tide goes out…?
O'Reilly: Yeah, see, the water — the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in…
Silverman: Maybe it's Thor up on Mount Olympus who's making the tides go in and out…

Tides

Every day the sea
blue gray green lavender
pulls away leaving the harbor’s
dark-cobbled undercoat

slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
walk there among old whalebones, the white
spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
as the hours tick over; and then

far out the faint, sheer
line turns, rustling over the slack,
the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over
the clam beds, slippery logs,

barnacle-studded stones, dragging
the shining sheets forward, deepening,
pushing, wreathing together
wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures

spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.

And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.

Hearing the rising tide, I think how it is pressing also against other shores I know — rising on a southern beach where there is no fog, but a moon edging all the waves with silver and touching the wet sands with lambent sheen, and on a still more distant shore sending its streaming currents against the moonlit pinnacles and the dark caves of the coral rock.

Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality — earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.

Down beyond the haven the tide comes with a shout.

Wave after wave
Will flow with the tide
And bury the world as it does
Tide after tide
Will flow and recede
Leaving life to go on
As it was... -- Natural Science (1980)

So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o’er;
So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

Quicksands

Demons and Wonders
Winds and Tides
Yet in the distance the sea has
withdrawn
Demons and Wonders
Winds and Tides
And you
Like a seaweed the wind gently
caresses
In the sands of your bed you're
moving dreaming
Demons and Wonders
Winds and Tides
Yet in the distance the sea has
withdrawn
But in your half-opened eyes
Two small waves staid
Demons and Wonders
Winds and Tides
Two small waves to drown myself.

Time, flowing like a river Time, beckoning me Who knows when we shall meet again If ever But time Keeps flowing like a river To the sea

Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died,
In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide,
Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea,
And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
too full for sound or foam,
when that which drew from out
the boundless deep
turns again home.

The tide was a poem that only time could create, and I watched it stream and brim and makes its steady dash homeward, to the ocean.

I used to think the world was flat Rarely threw my hat into the crowd I felt I had used up my quota of yearning Used to look in on the children at night In the glow of their Donald Duck light And frighten myself with the thought of my little ones burning But ooh, the tide is turning The tide is turning.