The Wreck of the Thresher

(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963) I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned. Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over, Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground. (But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.) This crushing of people is something we live with. Daily, by unaccountable whim Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death, Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame, Men and women break the pledge of breath: And now under water, gone all jetsam and small In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull. (Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts? The only animal cursed with responsible sleep, We trace disaster always to our own acts. I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep: All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.) We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor At first light: with better grace than men In their movements the vessels run to their labors Working the fields that the tide has made green again; Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens, Although by a wise superstition these are called After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine. The crushing of any ship has always been held In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled. I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet And dark and lost were their private, funny derision And I can judge then what dark compression Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below. ( Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams, Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last—