178 Ocean poems

Along Ocean Highway, apartments rise up to ten and twenty stories, white, hallucinatory, defying the shifting sand, the storm moving in off the Atlantic that drives the rain, needlelike, across the windshield so that we can’t see, so that we stop in Ocean City to wait the storm out at the Dutch, the only bar on the boardwalk open this time of year, all the concessions boarded up, weather-beaten, closed against the season. Last summer in violet light, kites spiraled downward in loops, then up, dragons and birds flying high above the boardwalk. Ocean City. Haven of the lost and aimless, with a ten-foot sand sculpture of Christ illuminated by neon lights. People on their way to Ripley’s BELIEVE IT OR NOT looked on in apathy, then wandered off, their children begging for another ride on the Avalanche or Safari. Out, far out, at the end of a pier, silhouetted against gray sky, gray water, Morbid Manor rose up, Gothic and dreamy, as children ran screaming from the exit door chased by a ghost with a chain saw. One child ignored it all; she lay with her face pressed close to a knothole in the pier, looking down, down, to the boiling black water. “What do you see?” I asked, but she didn’t move or answer me. Long, narrow, and dark, the Dutch, with its shifting clientele— from summer weekend pickups to Ocean City regulars— allows for strangers. We order Irish coffee, then two more, and use our change to play an arcade game. Aliens, half an inch high, in green armor, drop out of a glowing sky and quickly multiply. Our backs to the storm, we play out old anxieties, losing each game to time and starting over: we must save what’s being threatened and not ask why.

After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the ocean. It wasn’t funny, but he giggled When a school of fish tickled his ribs. He went home, the surf not rideable, It was no longer there, The water weighted in his belly. That night, while he slept, the tide moved. The long arms of the moon Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free. When he woke the next morning, He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.

Far, far out lie the white sails all at rest; Like spectral arms they seem to touch and cling Unto the wide horizon. Not a wing Of truant bird glides down the purpling west; No breeze dares to intrude, e’en on a quest To fan a lover’s brow; the waves to sing Have quite forgotten till the deep shall fling A bow across its vibrant chords. Then, lest One moment of the sea’s repose we lose, Nor furnish Fancy with a thousand themes Of unimagined sweetness, let us gaze On this serenity, for as we muse, Lo! all is restless motion: life’s best dreams Give changing moods to even halcyon days.

To G. de Chirico I have built a house in the middle of the Ocean Its windows are the rivers flowing from my eyes Octopi are crawling all over where the walls are Hear their triple hearts beat and their beaks peck against 
the windowpanes House of dampness House of burning Season’s fastness Season singing The airplanes are laying eggs Watch out for the dropping of the anchor Watch out for the shooting black ichor It would be good if you were to come from the sky The sky’s honeysuckle is climbing The earthly octopi are throbbing And so very many of us have become our own gravediggers Pale octopi of the chalky waves O octopi with pale beaks Around the house is this ocean that you know well And is never still Translated from the French

I. The worker’s pants on a spider-filament line, strung waist to waist to waist to dry. The neat green wedge of park, always empty; the length of concrete paced by convalescents. The lead impastos of interesting weather, though mostly the shadowless blue of long days. The sprawl of water beyond the band of beach, copper or tinfoil depending on the sun coming down, the moon rising. The storefront and the thumb of hydrant in front of it, in all kinds of light solidly composed and unspeculative. The garage’s brick side facing a warehouse wall; between them, the alley’s cold black aisle. The swells of a scalloped awning; the sheetlike descent of streetwise birds. Tubercular with rust, the flue leaking steam. And behind the blind-eye panes, the figure who must have chosen to be here. II. At a window someone watches for daybreak, which begins for him with a spar of sun lighting a stringcourse on the opposite building, its tendrils and blooms freshly chiseled when mornings have an acidly clean brightness, or mildewed, chalky with soot, when the overcast will not pull back from the day. Hobbled now, but still ardent, wandering, he looks at the postcards showing the city and its lit grids, touches mangoes going soft in crates, and listens always for the murmurings:An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. Spare a dollar for a lobotomy? Everything taken up, pocketed, added to an accrual having less to do with weight than with lightness: the plane of a wall, say, with pink stucco rough as emery, and the little fish, green as muscat grapes, selling out at a dime a dozen. III. Fender-chrome, gravel molars, brittle sepals holding up the dead rose, the bottle collecting rain—a precise light found for each like the faded brown for leaves, ground-down crystal for frost. The formless moil of paint, spread into surface, depicts the day exact. So with the persimmons almost forgotten into ordinariness, the moons of candle-wax on the table—things clearer somehow for entering the orange, brown, and white I make use of. Rising, I am elated by the light on cold red leaves and on successive clouds, each one edge-lit, its heart incinerate. And the light makes use of me in ways only line, curve, and shadow can describe, drawn toward what pity or love that the day, emptied but unsubdued, gives in to: Every day he poured himself into it, as water might pour from a flask.

The Ocean has its silent caves, Deep, quiet, and alone; Though there be fury on the waves, Beneath them there is none.

Ocean which I pushed up with my fingers so I could touch the orange sand below and white mountain which is not white but for getting caught in the cold Stay here where it is warm and where the sun shines, for later celestial garlands of dead light will draw you into the cold for sure

(To James H. Whyte) All is lithogenesis—or lochia, Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, Stones blacker than any in the Caaba, Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform, Making mere faculae of the sun and moon, I study you glout and gloss, but have No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again From optik to haptik and like a blind man run My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr, Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear, An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns, Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world, Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn? What artist poses the Earth écorché thus, Pillar of creation engouled in me? What eburnation augments you with men’s bones, Every energumen an Endymion yet? All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems, But where is the Christophanic rock that moved? What Cabirian song from this catasta comes? Deep conviction or preference can seldom Find direct terms in which to express itself. Today on this shingle shelf I understand this pensive reluctance so well, This not discommendable obstinacy, These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling, These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion, Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun. The inward gates of a bird are always open. It does not know how to shut them. That is the secret of its song, But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful. I look at these stones and know little about them, But I know their gates are open too, Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be, That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer Than all birds put together, let alone humanity, Though through them no man can see, No man nor anything more recently born than themselves And that is everything else on the Earth. I too lying here have dismissed all else. Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth, From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight. I would scorn to cry to any easier audience Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response. I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is; I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does; Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones. I must begin with these stones as the world began. Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran? To a bird, and to myself, a man? And what if I do, and further? I shall only have gone a little way to go back again And be like a fleeting deceit of development, Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed All but all of evolution, unmoved by it, (Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?) As the essential life of mankind in the mass Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.

I In a detachment cool as the glint of light on wet roads through wet spruce, or iced mountains hailed from the sea in moonfill, or the sea when one horizon’s black and the other burning; the gulls are kissing time in its own flowing over the shell-scraped rock   a coming and going as of glass bees with a bubble of light in each running errands in and out of the sunset. Over the road and the spruce wood, over the ice, and out the picture of my picture window, the exorbitant separation of nature from nature wheels, whirls, and dances on itself. Now damn me for a moral. Over and out, over and in, the gulls drift up afire, screaming like hinges in the broken air of night and day like two smokes on the sea. And I do nothing. A shadow three feet under my window in the light, I look at light in one of the years of my life. This or another. Or all together. Or simply in this moment. II Lead flags of the sea. Steel furls of the surf. Day smoke and night smoke. Fire at the smoke’s top. A passion from the world in a calm eye. A calm of the world in the eye of passion. The day that sank birdless from staring Calvary was another. And only another. And no other than the clucking calm of Eden fussed to rest from the black bush afire in the first eye. A calm-in-violence like Aegean time. Day smoke and night smoke over the palled sea tensed for a clash of tridents. Far ashore, a staring army camped beside a temple, the base of the temple black with powder stains, the pediment flashing wild in light above. —A day of the world in which a part of the world looked at another, two parts of a mist. At Cassino the dusty German wetting his lips, his eyes crashed in his face like unhatched birds’ eggs splashed from their nest, looked East from the burning night. There was no West. Light came from nowhere behind him, slanted, flowed level, drained. He looked out, waiting. Where had it come from, the light of his terrible patience? A dead man waited to die on the shell-scraped stones of another God, dust of the stones caked to his body, rivers of blood within him ran to their dusty sea beside the world. Calm in his changes, risen from his changes, he looked his life out at the smoking world. III I have no more to do than what I wait for under the changing light and the gulls afire in rays of rose-quartz. Holy ghosts of the sea, they rise in light from behind me. The light lifts long from the edge of the world and juts away over the top of the dark. My life sits visible to itself; and I sit still in a company of survivors and the dead. Jew. Greek, German, man at the edge of himself in the long light over the worlds he ran to to save unsaved. I practice the man in all, clutching the world from the world to praise it.

What I lose you let me, accusation always gets one in. But I want to talk like the dead remember that town where we went or how do I know when I’m just a soul — not when I’m leading? A soul can lead, fight and kill; in the sketchy rain there, but you can’t kill where we’re dead. That’s the best thing — no one has any power. How can I lead you without power? We want to find out ... Drop everything? — there’s no gravity. Are you grave? There’s no bravery. I’m going to lead you into a you you don’t know ... Most people want to go. There we risked being wrong but that was a linguistic quality, or you could have brought us to hell. Outside of gravity, instead, is the house. It wasn’t built with raisins. The light there, but what’s it for? For eyes. He called me “Four Eyes” now I have billions. It’s a house on the coast Is it the House of Answers? I will continue to reason for you, living on no particular income deep in my soul. The house has a basement I didn’t know about connecting to My Sea, Mare Meum. The answers break with foam and wild pearls. The wind is me too — you know who you are — where’s the desert? The sea came back to this land, to the abandoned its lover. The kind of sea you can’t drown in. You can want to coincide with me for I am the soul your leader the clear rock of kind mind, senseless. Senseless free will — the only thing here.