178 Ocean poems

We pass the straits of the Cape where grazing whales gather, though they’re not, I’m told, social creatures by nature. Alice asks how they can sleep if they must think to breathe. Cranial hemispheres wink and wake and alternate, so whales are half-awake and half-asleep, balanced between each of our states through dive and breach. Once on the kitchen wall of a dune shack I saw, like a headdress, the baleen of a whale— frayed filaments run from a thin, curled, rib-like bone: sieves for the sea. Like this sickle-moon fin “negatively buoyant” I sink in sleep, but end, I think, where I begin. Following one as it leaves two other whales we see suddenly not what we’re heading for but the asymmetrically colored snout of a fin whale as it rises parallel within a stone’s throw of the boat, the great eye set back water crashing rushing to let me see where it ought to be. I lose track, the mottled chin’s marble veined, swirling through its green veil, which the top jaw slits. And then, that’s it, I think. Nights I’m thrown upright from my rest. Brine thumps my chest.

Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown— however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I've striven undulant, erosive, blown— or lying flat as glass for your falling clear down: I can't swallow you. So why have I felt I've reached you—as two reflected stars, surfaced, lie near—as if the sky's close element is one in me, where starfish cleave to stones—if you're so far? I've touched you, I know, but my rush subsides; our meetings only leave desire's fleeting trace. Every place I touch you changes shape. Shore, lie down— undo. I'll fill your thirsty bones with blue. I'll flood your every cave and we'll be one.

I live in a room by the sea, where the view is great and the food is free. Some of the tenants come and go. Some I eat, if they're too slow. One end of me is firmly locked. The other end just gently rocks. I live in a room by the sea. It's perfect for an anemone.

Nothing curves at sea, and the men there die abruptly, in imitation of the fact, except when the ship rises higher than necessary and then they must drop suddenly but for a long time, so that their deaths appear natural in the end, and the women sweeping the coutyards pause, thinking the dust to be the cause of a specific dryness in the mouth. They leave half of a pastry to harden on a plate. They leave all of the lemons and figs in bowls. They leave fuschia splattered on the stone steps leading down to the bay. They carry their brooms with them, keep sweeping the air, cleaning it back to the sea. They sweep the sand from the shore, feet standing in neat little rows of foam. Each at the edge of something when the foghorns remind them: they will not clearly remember it, they will not altogether forget it. They will wait for something to emerge, like a man at sea carving his children from soap. One woman will start the rumor that the sea is deeper than necessary: Tell her, when has anyone ever come back for one day’s effort on earth?

The water off these rocks is green and cold. The sandless coast takes the tide in its mouth, as a wolf brings down a deer or lifts its child. I walked this bay before you were my child. Your fingers stinging brightly in the cold, I take each one and warm it in my mouth. Though I’ve known this shore for years, my mouth holds no charms of use to you, my child. You will have to learn the words to ward off cold and know them cold, child, in your open mouth.

to Pete Foss, God give him good berth! Shipped deckhand June of ’fifty-one aboard the freighter Willis Kerrigan,

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over again, like the rented animals in Aïda . In the late morning the land breeze turns and now the extras are driving all the white elephants the other way. What language are these children shouting in? He is lying on the beach listening. The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels. He tries to remember snow noise. Would powder snow ping like that? But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow. Why doesn’t the girl who takes care of the children, a Yale girl without flaw, know the difference between lay and lie? He tries to remember snow, his season. The mind is in charge of things then. Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic, all that openness and swaying. No matter how often you make love in August you’re always aware of genitalia, your own and the half-naked others’. Even with the gracefulest bathers you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises, mammals disporting themselves in a blue element, smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard watches himself awhile, like a blue movie. In the other hemisphere now people are standing up, at work at their easels. There they think about love at night when they take off their serious clothes and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets. Today the children, his own among them, are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese, using the colonial dialect of Brazil. It is just as well, they have all been changed into small shrill marginal animals, he would not want to understand them again until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

—“mu” twenty-eighth part— On Antiphon Island they lowered the bar and we bent back. It wasn’t limbo we were in albeit we limbo’d. Everywhere we went we limbo’d, legs bent, shoulder blades grazing the dirt, donned andoumboulouous birth-shirts, sweat salting the silence we broke... Limbo’d so low we fell and lay looking up at the clouds, backs embraced by the ground and the ground a fallen wall we were ambushed by... Later we’d sit, sipping the fig liqueur, beckoning sleep, soon-come somnolence nowhere come as yet. Where we were, not- withstanding, wasn’t there... Where we were was the hold of a ship we were caught in. Soaked wood kept us afloat... It wasn’t limbo we were in albeit we limbo’d our way there. Where we were was what we meant by “mu.” Where we were was real, reminiscent arrest we resisted, bodies briefly had, held on to • “A Likkle Sonance” it said on the record. A trickle of blood hung overhead I heard it spurts. An introvert trumpet run, trickle of sound... A trickle of water lit by the sun I saw with an injured eye, captive music ran our legs and we danced... Knees bent, asses all but on the floor, love’s bittersweet largesse... I wanted trickle turned into flow, flood, two made one by music, bodied edge gone up into air, aura, atmosphere the garment we wore. We were on a ship’s deck dancing, drawn in a dream above hold... The world was ever after, elsewhere. Where we were they said likkle for little, lick ran with trickle, weird what we took it for... The world was ever after, elsewhere, no way where we were was there

His sorceries are boo-hooing a teller, what’s spare’s on the local trots better than breakfast. A win’s the Seychelles or the gurgling Maldives. Going fast. Where the pig-footed bandicoot, the broad-faced potoroo, the gumnut numbat? spooked, bespoke, honor’s in a trapdoor. He stumped up, but crime befell kismet pardon repelled mores coin begat loss.

1 A bright red boat Yellow capsicums Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls 2 Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer Her dark black kohl-lined lashes 3 A street child’s brown fists holding the rainbow in his small grasp 4 My lost memory white and frozen now melts colour ready to refract