John Barr

Such as there was in the littleness of that dawn could not be this. Not, certainly, the hove of an invasion fleet from Angleterre, flotilla wrought of shipwright, chandler, armorer as if Ice Age breeding stocks were on the move. The Planners had their weather oracles, haruspices their entrails. All divined the red planet aligned, full-moon visibility, high tides to clear the beachhead obstacles — but iffy weather.

I stare down into waterburn. This urge to enter what we see. Unrefracted tropical sun with its whole arm works deeply the ocean interior. Water and light in union make a third thing—color as fluid deepened endlessly. Into the quarry of aquamarine, high-walled with light, the mind high dives. My fingers cleave watersilk. I breathe heavy light. The big cavitation of the props gone by, my struggling stops, my slowed descent, in diminishing light, gains the country where the shark is eagle, fish the fishermen, and men no more than stones along the road.

The coastline edges to the edge of our chart. We move on a central, generous blue. Wind high, ocean plain smack tonnage our bow plows through, the boiling salt excitement of our wake, gone in minutes, then birds on our bobbing crates a thousand miles from land. To pass the time I try to teach our bosun mate "Sailing to Byzantium." Good-natured, he laughs and laughs. It is by no   means enough that an officer    o f   the Navy should be a capable mariner.   H e   must  be that,  of  course, but  also  a  grea t deal more.  He  should   be  the  soul  of  tac t,   patience,   justice,   firmness  and   charity .  No  meritorious  act  of  a  subordinate  sho uld  escape  without  its  reward,  even  if  the reward  is  only  a  word  of  approval. Conver sely, he  should  not  be  blind   to  a  single  f ault in  any  subordinate  though,  at  the sam e time,  he  should  be  quick  and unfailing  t o  distinguish  error   from  malice, thoughtle ssness from  incompetency, and well meant s hortcoming from heedless  or stupid blunder.

Spiders in the cold, bees in inarticulate bunches hang from a day's work. Waiting for light they wait to see what they will be. A tree lets down green undersides and is maple. A window glints— a thing of saffron kindles with singlehood. In the broad yard each thing dandles its blue, its name, its consequence.

Things in the dark exist but are not realized. Perhaps with wings they wait for enacting light. I start out as the sky descends to the visible spectrum and begins. Midmorning I find in a lab a blue magnetic fluid: revolving in the stress of gauss, the source of blue resides. November nights, up to the first snow, derive from this seat of blue. I spend a month reflecting at Palomar. My delicate fourteen tons I bring to bear on galaxies: their lonely shine harbors on my dustless, understanding curve. I come to a mountain out of season. The brass benchmark telling the height is under ice. Without witness, without cease a blizzard pummels the summit's face. I reach the pole. Here at the axis the wobble and grind is audible. My compass tries to point straight down. It, too, deceived: Having achieved one absolute, the source of north, to find that south surrounds, is all but it. The Humboldt Current has my boat and its mile of line straight down. Now and then, fishermen haul in the inexplicable along with seabream, haddock, squid. I hook a coelacanth, thought long extinct, and brain it with an oar. Nose to the bottom I shove off from the hundred fathom curve. Slow footage of mud unreeling through my mind, the miles of decline become my age. Hauled up someday by accident, rupturing in the lost pressure, my look will say how knowing feels. Living among the trilobites I learn you cross great lengths of time by stilling the waiting in yourself. From scavengers I see how you can live off your own dead kind. I gum the grit of a tidal flat and have no name. A chance letter brings me home, telling how I was found. Returned I sit like water in a jar, light from a window passing through, a slow rain of precipitate remembering the bottom.