Encounter

At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis, Its fugue-like swells create and recreate One image in an idiot concentration. From horizon to horizon, this desert With the eye athirst for something stable When off to southeast-ward— It was a plane all right, or had been, A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her. Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure If it were ours or had been one of theirs. That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor, Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god. What did it mean? They thought of night fleets In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon: The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles, The pause, the roar like a night freight And the near misses building their faery forests. Where were these giants? The sea offered A single clue, a symbol; no explanation. Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons As if jealous of giving up secured positions The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.