Here’s a poem I wrote as a teenager.
The Beachcombers
We stood beside Long Island Sound, Her voice quavered high to low. The beach’s dunes roll long and round, The sinuous seabirds go.
She wept and cursed and screamed and sighed Then stabbed a finger at her breast Shouted angry words elide: The troughs for now outweigh the crests.
She spoke in tuneless tremolo I stood silent and ashamed The seagulls and I watched her go While the soprano breeze declaimed.
She left with nothing else to say The wind had amplified its din Her footprints already worn away - Yet the redundant waves roll in.
Not bad, but not so good! I was never much of a poet, and never wrote more than a half-dozen poems in my life. A few years after writing this I would dig deep into Wallace Stevens and said to myself, yeah, I’ll never be this smart. As it happens I didn’t even self-identify as a writer until my late twenties. I’ll cop to the fact that this entire poem was written to produce the final line; I had discovered that the old definition (or an old definition) of the word redundant was “wavelike.” It makes sense, as a piece of etymology - waves repeat. And I was just so tickled by the words “redundant waves.” In the poem, the waves are redundant because the wind has already worn away the footprints that the waves would too, but also, redundant waves can mean “wavelike waves,” itself a redundancy. The rest is a not-entirely-incompetent bit of engineering to arrive at that construction. Anyhow: I’m no poet.
I share this mostly to remind myself of when words felt new.