178 Ocean poems

Let’s say I’m Captain Cook, setting sail to drift until currents push me into a certain lane, certain highway with its humpbacked traffic bobbing along. My young aren’t strapped in the back flinging Cheerios into the crevices like a game of darts but moored in the house with my patient wife so I can seek my destiny here— And I have no destination, not the Friendly Center or aquarium—I journey only to find a usable route. I’m stewing the bones a fourth time to leach any last savor for my broth— not gumming pirate birthday cake with seafoam-colored frosting, nor placing my order at the drive-thru (no, not a Frosty, not a McRib)— Place-names are still to be scrawled, new-minted to mark this passage, its weather and bits of luck. The usable route’s a velvet highway I’ll trace to parchment—a new day, a new world, not the GPS lady recalculating— These words held in my mouth, these words a way to inscribe we are not lost in a vast expanse of lostness.

There was a fire in the night. Across the street I slept among the others as the ashes snowed upon small pines. I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant of fortune’s blistering story, the playful flash in the dark, the unseen smolder that would leave us revealed, unchanged. I said my prayers for luck but the man trying to live in two houses answers me now, losing neither the old one whose windows burst with weariness, nor the one half-built whose roofless, green timbers he would leave unfinished like a vision. I had climbed there all summer to smoke. Awake, I found him sitting at his stool halfway between the houses where I would go each morning. The story of the sea would be upon his tongue, his hands weaving the wire to a trap, making the careful seams to catch a scuttling crab. Beyond him, his wife already had begun to stretch her wash, indifferent in that early light, and a dog lapped from the ruts of the fire truck. I believed little had been changed by fire, only his toolshed limp as a black sail left in a heap, and a new hole in the landscape. This was an old place where no one came, luckless, desperate, eternal as guilt. In silence I greeted that old one. But now I remember seeing also, as if for the first time, the shocking gray face of the sea. It loomed up human and beautiful as far off the figures of boats crossed, worked, and seemed to sink while they burned in the sullen sun.

As I       toss & roll these bones at the 2nd,  3rd & 4th vertebra the curvity of my neck where something of  a       winged   fused bowed   & fossilized merged   kink-bended wrongly & fused  bowed & fossilized    then merged bended   slouched    in a hunchbacked   crooked pain    into   a pinged pang    where   needles & cracks at my side-to-side forced   hanging   sluiced movement   of   ivory scalloped   cervixes  at the nape   & snaps   snaps I rebound   at the fear & instinctively   quake with vanquished surrender in numbness   & wake  then mumble   you’re part of me now   leave   & it slaps its tale then    a V formation following & decelerates   the sea waved source   of   vigor  110  years old.

Down here, no light but what we carry with us. Everywhere we point our hands we scrawl color: bulging eyes, spines, teeth or clinging tentacles. At negative buoyancy, when heavy hands seem to grasp & pull us down, we let them, we don’t inflate our vests, but let the scrubbed cheeks of rocks slide past in amniotic calm. At sixty feet we douse our lights, cemented by the weight of the dark, of water, the grip of the sea’s absolute silence.  Our groping hands brush the open mouths of anemones, which shower us in particles of phosphor radiant as halos.  As in meditation, or in deepest prayer, there is no knowing what we will see.

Plankton rise toward the full moon spread thin on Wakaya’s surface. Manta rays’ great curls of jaw scoop backward somersaults of ocean in through painted caves of their mouths, out through sliced gills. Red sea fans pulse. The leopard shark lounges on a smooth ramp of sand, skin jeweled with small hangers-on. Pyramid fish point the way to the surface. Ninety feet down, blue ribbon eels cough, their mouths neon cautions. Ghost pipefish curl in the divemaster’s palm. Soft corals unfurl rainbow polyps, thousands of mouths held open to night. Currents’ communion—giant clams slam shut wavy jaws, send shivers of water. Christmas tree worms snap back, flat spirals tight, living petroglyphs against the night.

Blood-drop, lung of fire setting past the sea bell and wave; why am I separate from that giant burrowing into further life? The body breathes and rides a heavy-netted ocean swollen by the tide. Under the half-moon it’s the lighthouse light that turns the rest of me to early nightfall, headland, home. I send it back, a mirrored flickering across cold waters. We allow ourselves the crest that breaks above the surface then re-forms. We make it human and we call it love. This wintering is my own and not the world’s, although the world is wintering.

“If you work a body of water and a body of woman you can take fish out of one and children out of the other for the two kinds of survival. The fishing is good, both kinds are adequate in pleasures and yield, but the hard work and the miseries are killing; it is a good life if life is good. If not, not. You are out in the world and in in the world, having it both ways: it is sportive and prevenient living combined, although you have to think about the weathers and the hard work and the miseries are what I said. It runs on like water, quickly, under the boat, then slowly like the sand dunes under the house. You survive by yourself by the one fish for a while and then by the other afterward when you run out. You run out a hooky life baited with good times, and whether the catch is caught or not is a question for those who go fishing for men or among them for things.”

for Dylan I watch the ocean square into a turning Burn. Burning, my holes glass over. Lightning Hits the beach, melts me shut. I’ve drowned Before, in the bye along a row of shored Rocks. From the barrel chest butcher I buy Tight roasts. This year’s man, his clownish dog walks me In the park until I die on his leash and domestic Night’s sticky seizures. I thumb and ♥ it Like liking a million times. The rich own long Lighthouses to show us how away from them We are. Past waiting for the press of his chest To my back, I hobby along to the next hem’s Promise. Again I straddle the blade thinking This is the time it will fill the gash.

About the Shark, phlegmatical one, Pale sot of the Maldive sea, The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim, How alert in attendance be. From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw They have nothing of harm to dread, But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank Or before his Gorgonian head; Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth In white triple tiers of glittering gates, And there find a haven when peril’s abroad, An asylum in jaws of the Fates! They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey, Yet never partake of the treat— Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull, Pale ravener of horrible meat.

It’s unbearable to shadowdrift along the seabed. It’s unbearable to grieve when sleeping is more important. The boat is a hammock without strings. As the body is a sleeve not strung to the soul. The boat is chained to the shadow; when the shadow drifts, the boat drifts too. Is it at sea? Or is it just in air? Can a boat live on air alone? The man’s back bleeds. This is all expected of creatures who sacrifice their nudity for solitude and immortality. The flesh is eager to float, fully captivated by the impulse to preserve an array of stillness. The horizon is not skirring and nothing can move on that river made of air. This boat. This boat. This boat that the horizon can’t coat with its own monolithic entreaty. The man bathes in all blemishes of the moon. The man’s body can take imperfection, as he feels complete. His white-grey hair is a type of condensed cloud he can rest his head on. If he must commit suicide, he knows he will rest on a very comfortable pillow, one that he grows from the ovoid base of his skull. It’s good to get all the hard work done first and then unbutton one’s corporeal flesh calmly before the undiluted enterprise of air. His penis is one finger pointing to the line that separates his thighs. Everything is hidden deliciously inside his pituitary gland.