The poem opens with a proverb turned inside out. "It's a poor man on the cliff / who cannot harvest gold and silver dreams by nightfall." A poor man, we assume, is someone without money, but here poverty means something else: an inability to notice what is already shining in front of you. The title, "Gold Is Where You Find It," sets up the same idea. Gold is not a fixed substance kept in vaults. It is a matter of where you look, and the poem goes looking at a beach at the end of an ordinary day.
What it finds there is a crowd of families heading home. Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody arrives or departs in any way that matters, and no one speaks. The speaker, standing on the cliff, watches people "carrying inner-tubes and limp towels and remnants of Sunday papers." That line is the poem's quiet joke and its quiet triumph. Inner-tubes, towels and half-read newspapers are about as unglamorous as objects get, yet the poem lists them lovingly, and the word "remnants" carries a gentle fondness, as if the leftovers of a lazy afternoon were relics worth keeping. The gold of the opening line has been rationed out as sunburn, coolness and laughter.
The poem is built as one long, unfolding sentence, and that construction does a lot of the work. After the short, almost aphoristic first line, the second stretches out and the rest of the poem keeps going without a full stop until the end. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead the lines vary in length, some short and some trailing, and the effect resembles the walk it describes: unhurried, loose-limbed, carrying things along. The syntax does what the families do, ambling forward at an easy pace, with one detail picked up after another like items collected along the shore.
The sound of the poem matters, too. The phrase "joyous, many-cornered sounds" is a risky, interesting one, because sounds do not normally have corners. Yet it fits. A family group is a jumble of voices bouncing off one another, children and parents and cousins all at different pitches, and "many-cornered" captures that knocked-together, irregular quality better than a plainer word like "cheerful" could. Later, the laughter is "loosely gathered from the lips of many idle waves." Here the poem makes a lovely exchange: the laughter of people is traced back to the waves, as though the sea had been collecting happiness all day and handing it out. The word "idle" is important. These waves are not working or struggling; they are at leisure, just like the people. Nature and humanity share the same unhurried mood.
The final lines turn the focus from people to objects: "shells and bulbs of kelp, / wave-worn sticks and thick green gems of bottles / smoothed by countless tidal trips across the beach slope." Here the "gold and silver" of the opening finally gets its translation. The real treasure is a handful of beachcomber's scraps, and the most striking is the bottle glass, called "thick green gems." Broken glass is rubbish, but the sea, given enough time, rounds it into something close to jewellery. The phrase "countless tidal trips" quietly suggests patience. Value, the poem implies, is made by repetition and gentleness, by being turned over again and again until the sharp edges wear away.
The same might be said of the families. They are shiny with sunburn, a small detail that turns skin into something almost metallic, and they smile "with the coolness of evening," which makes the end of the day itself seem to have a temperature and a taste. The wealth in the poem is physical and ordinary: warmth, tiredness, company, and the pleasant ache of a day spent outdoors.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to make a speech. It could have lectured us about money and happiness. Instead it hands us a list of damp towels and rounded glass and trusts us to feel the point. The cliff is a clever vantage, too, since from up there the speaker is at once part of the scene and slightly apart from it, someone who has learned to see. The poem's argument is that this kind of seeing is itself a form of riches, and that anyone willing to look down at the evening beach can claim some.