178 Ocean poems

not to be in love with you I can’t remember what it was like it must’ve been lousy James Schuyler You take off your black motorcycle jacket, hang it on the back of a chair. It’s cold from our walk along the sea wall. Your pockets jingle with shells. While we were gone, you left the stove on low—some things you do make me so nervous. You graze the surface of sauce simmering in a pan, shiny fingertip held out for me to lick, you say “What does it need?” Maybe nothing, maybe honey to unbitter the lime. Later that night you’ll bury your face in my belly and sob. “I’m sorry,” though I don’t think you are always talking to me, my love. But now lobster steam billows up the window, you gulp purple wine, your pinky sticking out, and the round olives are the green all green things aspire to be.

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon down where the jaws snap blindly at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue and ghost-lit lantern into a sea like liquid wind, without prior compass of the way the wind is blowing. Should they be gifted with a corpse whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate eternal summers spent glittering in the euphotic zone, they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy. In the cartography of sea, they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris but to your own bright band — yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand from a long-gone grocery display, drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.

1 “With never a whisper on the main,” so the snow falls, glaring through the festschrift of acacia leaves at sunrise and seeping a dye of immortelle on mild fleece, shrinking back eternity to flurries stalking summer cairns. Somewhere, harpies in cruisers blare beneath prairie clouds. An iceberg flashes, turns a smoke of ice on the air. The cold repels, draws out redoubling whites; in the green heat you hallucinate where the sea runs, light on light, creeping the heights your new turret on the house in clouds scorns nothing: poetry’s sub rosa, ever uncompromised, as now, infrared crows eclipse the lawns. 2 And I once brute and stammering to you toppled in a blue beach chair, pushed to the meridian-hush island coup talk, but your eyes search out where children leap hotels’ sand dams and worry the guard and his dog. The triumph of surrender, of love flamed from history, like that pyro-tailor’s scissors bright roar, reducing the “treasury of the poor.” You sputter into a blinding cough and recover with, “Emerson?” Yes, that culprit all along, new to me, so was Boston Common when we waited in the trash fire of autumn and could feel salt driving off the Atlantic. 3 Where the mezcal ferns begin and after them dross wet soil rises from bank to ridge, sunset’s slow inflation; you point; they change in one stroke to mountain-blue foliage! On utility poles hang night’s recessive fable. Again, you stab the windscreen    ...out there, abundant still lifes, the stark inflammable river you will cross over, recoil at the pier. What value is the ride? In digression, art. A mare froths in the sea the following day. It seems, gathered up by spokes of clouds, caught in an agonizing conversion. You jolt towards it, but out laughed a schoolboy, way too happy — “O Apilo!” — sun-blasted, all colors. 4 Clinking cavalcade inching up the Sunday road lined with crowds: none anonymous, moving as lines do, growing in depth of play, unstable and absolute where they must. Each thing has a crack, indeed. Adjust the mirror beyond the surf’s exhortation and see arched dolphins at equinox blur with drizzle Port Antonio into Vigie. Half mile of bamboo cathedral tunnels an airy pass there once; its shadows hacked away and in that vacancy light depreciates now. Geography is not fate but fatal. Gone is the corridor to hold your glory. The sun and sea in your eyes still bow. 5 Pilgrim of occasional fireflies, brooding inside the Alliance Française Pyramid, where the wild honey expires and the doggerel air embalms all you’ve lived, relived with lament and praise. Pain’s license. Silence, then the reciprocity of silence, its immense language sends an ibis to absolve and to mark your sins. Late-in-life astonishment, like bitcoins on the tongue. What you say is hidden in noon gossip. Yes, having a gift is to be called. Since it is given, let it go. The mind irons bronze in water, a voice radiating: “We please our elders when we sit enthralled.” 6 Ascend and bless the devil’s altitude. Shale drifting from the sky’s blue furnace. Slant sparks of green off the vale Santa Cruz below, being so blessed, this is penance, of a kind, my own road to Emmaus, wafers upon wafers of oleanders suture those eyes scattered and staring through dust. Around each bend arrives the future, which departs exactly close to Lalibela one fleeting night the rock churches wept by my ears, refracted Stoney Hill’s stars, their ragged music pitching diaspora against despair. Such music you’ve left withstands permanently the striation of scars. 7 To evening air I add, “blown cane blown cane blown cane,” and step into the Quattrocento outside the library by the pier. All’s changed. Blown I am a broad Antillean echo lost in the marrow wings of a pelican, or an albatross, cloud remnant, tasseled low flyer below the radar of the wind. Trade Winds. Travailed not traveled. Shit-bloodied. A million blades choir and collapse on repeat their absolute, surging pledge, picked up by potholes which I jump to reach home. Blown canes, singed from the African holocaust. Dark breaks in me carrying your line, lucid sandglass, seething uphill. Mine to keep and give. 8 The kite season is early. Little insurgence everywhere of souls lifting, subsiding half transparent in night’s green silence. By morning they are fallen over the cement fence, your childhood allamandas annunciate your last withdrawal into heat so fierce it breaks its own laws and the man into tears along Lapeyrouse seawall, his umbrella kite shielding the sun from the murals. Meantime, I hesitate on a maroon canal in Delft, crossing water’s filial piety, erring rings whisper “small honors in the storm” and watch moss lilies drift into untouchable maze, fastened to each other. Your ancestors’ spires are of ambergris, they magnify in the water my spectral self.

Mother, I have been devastated all my life. I never said anything. That’s why I wear a parachute. Why I tiptoed from my bedroom to yours, and lay my head on the beige carpet for fear of worse. Were there sirens? There were. Were there familiar songs? Yes. I am afraid of the beds I have been in. In the morning there was the heel of your boot sharper than before. Mother, what do I do with your mail? Do you want to keep this snake in the basement? What about the kitten? Do you want all these photographs of other people’s children? The temperature in the lizard’s cage is dropping. Let’s be realistic. If I open the windows the birds will come in and eat out the eyes. Mother, I am bereft. Mother, I wear your necklace and nothing else. Mother, I never. Nevermind. Let’s be fatalistic. The neighbors know I’m down here. I can hear them watching. Mother, after they take your eyes I will sew the lids myself.

On occasion, when the mood takes him as it so often does, he will put down his papers, get up from his kindly old chair, and leave for a while the sweeping beam to sow its charitable seed — that seed which, when falling on the ground of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness, ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance. He descends then, the long corkscrew of the stairs and opens at their base the metal door so that he may take a closer look at what might be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always finds the churning world, she laps at him from every side with no respite, and spatters him with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation, a tone which he adopted long ago when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes, there is no danger here from neither shark nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is like a dressing-up box with whimsy. Indeed, were there such creatures hidden neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves, they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is that as he gazes out, he cannot help but wonder what it is he might be warning of with the light that turns atop his tower, because that tower is itself in fact the only hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.

Spotlight a SCENE ONE: Open-air court in the ancient city of Athens. The accused arrive and proceed among curses and cries of Death! Death! SCENE TWO: A jail in the same city, beneath the Acropolis, walls half-eaten by dampness. On the ground, a miserly straw mat and in the corner, an earthenware jar of water. On the outside wall, a shadow: the guard. SCENE THREE: Constantinople. In the harem of the Holy Place, in candlelight, the Queen throws a pouch of gold coins to the Head Eunuch who bows and looks at her significantly. By the open door, his men at the ready. SCENE FOUR: Drawing room of a large Monastery. Oblong table, the abbot at its head. Sweaty monks come and go bringing news: a crowd spills into the streets, setting fires, destroying everything. SCENE FIVE: Nauplio. Greek and Bavarian officers outside the King’s quarters converse in low tones. A messenger takes the dispatch and heads toward the steps that lead on high to Palamidi. SCENE SIX: In front of an old and empty lot in contemporary Athens, a crowd, motley with priests and bishops, gathers to cast a stone, “the stone of anathema.” SCENE SEVEN: Low buildings of EAT/ESA. In the courtyard, drunken soldiers. Braying and lewd posturing. The officer leaving some cell says something to the military doctor. Behind them thuds and cries are heard.

His new hip healed in, we're working on a bluff, talking doctors and health care reform as we shove a new propane tank into place. A shape on the surface catches his eye: "Right whale," he says, but I can only see endless swells rolling in from the east. He points out the gradations of gray and green that mark deep ledge, the tide's shape along the islands and rocks, the whale's glistening back suddenly in focus. I react with the same surprise my patients feel when I observe what they can't see— a sudden shift in gaze, or a crease in a cheek, understanding how a doctor becomes like a man who has spent sixty years on a lobster boat, watching the world swim fast and shining, right before his eyes.

–"mu" fifty-third part– Some new Atlantis known as Lower Ninth we took leave of next, half the turtle’s back away. Whole bodies we saw floating, not only heads... Endless letting go, endless looking else- where, endless turning out to be otherwise... Woods all around where we came to next. We’d been eating wind, we’d been drinking wind, rumoring someone looked at God eye to eye... In what seemed a dream but we saw wasn’t we saw dirt sliding. We were back and all the buildings were gone. What were cliffs to us we wondered, blown dust of Bandiagara, what the eroding precipice we saw... Ground acorns ground our teeth now. All but all gums, we were where the Alone lived, came to a clearing lit by light so bright we staggered, Nub it was we knew we were still in... The mountain of the night a mound of nothing, Toulali’s burr what balm there was. Toulali’s burr what balm, remote though it was, lifetimes behind us now... Voice laryngitic, lost and lost again, blown grit rubbed it away... Someone had said something came to mind. Someone had sung something, what its words were no one could say. Sang it bittersweet, more brusque than bitter, song’s cloth endowment stripped... Choric strain, repeatedly slipped entablature. Given... Given endlessly again... No telling when but intent on telling, no telling what. Wished we were home again • Refugees was a word we’d heard, raw talk of soul insistent, adamant, the nonsong we sang or the song we nonsang, a word we’d heard we heard was us... Wept in our sleep, again one with what would never again be there, raw talk rummaged our book, the backs of our hands written on with cornmeal, the awaited ones reluctant again... The city of sad children’s outskirts we were in, woods notwithstanding, woods nonetheless, bright light the light we saw as we were jolted, raw talk spiraling away... We were there and somewhere else no matter where we were, everywhere more than where we were... Where the Alone lived we donned abalone-shell ornaments, light’s clarity conceded, night yet to relent, Toulali smoldered on, semisang, semispoke, wrestled with his tongue it seemed... We trudged in place, barely lifted our feet, backbeat hallowing every step we took,       moved us albeit we stayed put. We were where we were, somewhere else no matter where, evacuees a word we’d heard... Stutter step, stuck shuffle, dancelike, Toulali’s croon enticed us, toyed with us, ground gone under where we stood ______________ Day of the new dead or a new day of the dead, La Catrina had we been farther south... One of us out of Mexico remembered, with us from no one could say when... Day of the new dead a new day of the dead... Wind in off the water blew us there. A beat before. Beginning's beginning. Never to be there again... Beginning beaten back, aboriginal. The Alone collecting shells on Lone Coast... They were the awaited ones' grudge not the awaited ones, the awaited ones' wish not to be there... Grudge or its ghost, grudge against going, grudge to've been anywhere at all... Gnostic hostages down on all fours, then-again's beginning, beat before beginning be- grudged • We were in the woods again circling, not far from Lone Coast,        kids again, wondered why anything was. The city of sad children a mood swing away, we strode imagining nothing, redwoods everywhere, muttered barely audibly, “Nothing is, nothing ever was,” chill so intrinsic we shook... No lament was it, not exactly insight, precocious not quite what it was. Beginning's beginning it seemed we came abreast of, beginning's beginning's ghost... We shivered, would've shed chill's incumbency had we been able, close but absconded with, all but all done, sperichill we called it, numb... Had there been a song, had someone asked who sang it,         whitecaps rushing the beach we'd have said, whitecapped anacrusis we'd have said, long since there and gone... Lower Ninth had fallen off, protobeat, protobegin- ning, blow borne before it began borne again, the one coast it all had become now crumbling, world edge, world rebuff... Circling no end it seemed, except we stopped, stood looking at the sunlight streaming in. Churchical some would've said but we resisted, felt it that way but wanted not to. Not was no guarantee... Circling no end it seemed... Same crowded same crowded same, ad infinitum, beginning's beginning's bluff ______________

I see it as it looked one afternoon In August,— by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown. The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon, A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon. The shining waters with pale currents strewn, The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove, The semi-circle of its dark, green grove. The luminous grasses, and the merry sun In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.

Not that the pines were darker there, nor mid-May dogwood brighter there, nor swifts more swift in summer air; it was my own country, having its thunderclap of spring, its long midsummer ripening, its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting, almost like any country, yet being mine; its face, its speech, its hills bent low within my reach, its river birch and upland beech were mine, of my own country. Now the dark waters at the bow fold back, like earth against the plow; foam brightens like the dogwood now at home, in my own country.