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Thirty seconds of yellow lichen. Thirty seconds of coil and surge, fern and froth, thirty seconds of salt, rock, fog, spray. Clouds moving slowly to the left— A door in a rock through which you could see __ another rock, laved by the weedy tide. Like filming breathing—thirty seconds of tidal drag, fingering the smaller stones down the black beach—what color was that, aquamarine? Starfish spread their salmon-colored hands. __ I stood and I shot them. I stood and I watched them right after I shot them: thirty seconds of smashed sea while the real sea thrashed and heaved— They were the most boring movies ever made. I wanted to mount them together and press Play. __ Thirty seconds of waves colliding. Kelp with its open attitudes, seals riding the swells, curved in a row just under the water— the sea, over and over. Before it's over.

The workman made it; therefore it is not God —Hosea Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Pittsburgh, of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque, ye hierophants and wishbones, teraphim and household plants, for I am a jealous God betrayed. My lover, whom I uplifted, has fallen to other affections. Weep for her outcast state, for I rescind her corn and her fields, her appetites and her husbands, her loom and the cloth of her weaving; yea, as she sleeps in her bed, I will crumble her idols of clay. I will cause to burn in the night her barns filled with swallows, her caves of rodents and bats, her racks of sidereal dresses, her stacks of serpentine hats. The velvet of her touch, once royal, I will scarify with my wrath. for I am a god betrayed; my love has reached into my weakness and turned my heart like a fist. Therefore, I will strip her naked and drive her into the field. In her body of filth and feathers, her blood of beasts and men, she is my desolation and a forgotten name. For my cosmos is contracted. My first world slips from my hands. Tell the people, my prophet Hosea, that I loved her more than love, and she gave not love in return. My anger flattens and spreads along the walls and windows. It glances from my mirrors and breaks the east wind’s bones. I was a God of such strength they could not guess my name. And this woman of human warmth suckled me like a child. Now I dwell with the mole, blindly, and my voice is thin as a gnat’s. I grieve what grinds in me, heavily. I am but a half note, half sung.

The water understands Civilization well; It wets my foot, but prettily, It chills my life, but wittily, It is not disconcerted, It is not broken-hearted: Well used, it decketh joy, Adorneth, doubleth joy: Ill used, it will destroy, In perfect time and measure With a face of golden pleasure Elegantly destroy.

Not that I understand things. Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can’t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight. Which isn’t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate — no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.

On hot days we would see them leaving the hive in swarms. June and I would watch them weave their way through the sugarberry trees toward the pond where they would stop to take a drink, then buzz their way back, plump and full of water, to drop it on the backs of the fanning bees. If you listened you could hear them, their tiny wings beating in unison as they cooled down the hive. My brother caught one once, its bulbous body bursting with water, beating itself against the smooth glass wall of the canning jar. He lit a match, dropped it in, but nothing happened. The match went out and the bee swam through the mix of sulfur and smoke until my brother let it out. It flew straight back to the hive. Later, we skinny-dipped in the pond, the three of us, the August sun melting the world around us as if it were wax. In the cool of the evening, we walked home, pond water still dripping from our skin, glistening and twinkling like starlight.

Spout of a leaf, listen out for the screams of your relentless audience: the applause of a waterfall in the distance, a hurricane looting a Miami shopping mall. How careful you are with the rain-cradling curve of your back. Near your forest, all are ready to swim and happy to drown in me: this lake of fire that moats the edges. From my mouth, they come to peel the flames and drink their slick throats into the most silent of ashes.

To the memory of a friend, drowned off Water Island, April, 1960 Finally, from your house, there is no view; The bay’s blind mirror shattered over you And Patchogue took your body like a log The wind rolled up to shore. The senseless drowned Have faces nobody would care to see, But water loves those gradual erasures Of flesh and shoreline, greenery and glass, And you belonged to water, it to you, Having built, on a hillock, above the bay, Your house, the bay giving you reason to, Where now, if seasons still are running straight, The horseshoe crabs clank armor night and day, Their couplings far more ancient than the eyes That watched them from your porch. I saw one once Whose back was a history of how we live; Grown onto every inch of plate, except Where the hinges let it move, were living things, Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time: The origins of art. It carried them With pride, it seemed, as if endurance only Matters in the end. Or so I thought. Skimming traffic lights, starboard and port, Steer through planted poles that mark the way, And other lights, across the bay, faint stars Lining the border of Long Island’s shore, Come on at night, they still come on at night, Though who can see them now I do not know. Wild roses, at your back porch, break their blood, And bud to test surprises of sea air, And the birds fly over, gliding down to feed At the two feeding stations you set out with seed, Or splash themselves in a big bowl of rain You used to fill with water. Going across That night, too fast, too dark, no one will know, Maybe you heard, the last you’ll ever hear, The cry of the savage and endemic gull Which shakes the blood and always brings to mind The thought that death, the scavenger, is blind, Blunders and is stupid, and the end Comes with ironies so fine the seed Falters in the marsh and the heron stops Hunting in the weeds below your landing stairs, Standing in a stillness that now is yours.

(To William and Flora Johnstone) Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again, Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t.

The Body as Nature, History All motivations intermingle as the core of history, the internal becomes external... all as parts of the body. — maurice merleau-ponty i.               the positing of space, corporeal history medium of my body

My earliest wish was not to exist, to burst in the backyard without violence, no blood, no fleshy bits, mute button pressed alone behind the rectory where no one would see me. This wasn’t a plea to be found or mourned for, but to be unborn into the atmosphere. To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth, rise until they freeze and crystallize, then drop into the aquifer.