At Days Bay

To lie on a beach after looking at old poems: how slow untroubled by any grouch of mine or yours, Father Ocean tumbles in the bay alike with solitary divers, cripples, yelling girls and pipestem kids. He does what suits us all; and somewhere — there, out there, where the high tight sails are going — he wears a white death flag of foam for us, far out, for when we want it. So on Gea’s breast, the broad nurse who bears with me, I think of adolescence: that sad boy I was, thoughts crusted with ice on the treadmill of self-love, Narcissus damned, who yet brought like a coal in a hallow stalk, the seed of fire that runs through my veins now. I praise that sad boy now, who having no hope, did not blow out his brains.