178 Ocean poems

Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords, And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words.

Their long stares mark them apart; eyes gone to sea-colors: gray, foam-flecked and black in the undertow, blue as the blue banners of  the mackerel, whipping west. On land, they are smoke-walkers, where each stone is a standing stone, every circle a stone circle. They would be rumor if they could, in this frozen landscape like a stopped sea, from the great stone keels of  Callanish to the walls of  Dunnottar and Drum. They would be less even than rumor: to be ocean-stealers, to never throw a shadow — to dream the blank horizon and dread the sight of  land. The drink storms through these men, uncompasses them, till they’re all at sea again. Their houses, heeled over in the sand: each ruin now a cairn for kites. And down by the quay past empty pots, unmended nets, and boats: this tiny bar, where men sleep upright in their own element, as seals.

Sees him at the far end of the strand, squamous in rubbery weed, his knees bobbing urchins, his lean trunk leaning, sea-treasure for her. After it all (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses) Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reused razor shell, mother-of-pearly and straight and signals out to the swell of moldering green. Dora is electric, in love, and deep water. Dora, Dora, Dora, in which dread is. People people the beach, peering through splayed hands, appealing: DAW-RAAaargh. A boat sees her passing. Sea-scribbler’s chest buckles in aftershock: his quill is primed: squid-inked and witful.

My shell said she likes the king and queen of the Poetry Palace because they listen to her. She tells them all the secrets of the ocean.

Down in the blue-green water at nightfall some selving shapes float fluorescing, trance-dancing, trembling to the rhythm of theodoxical marching- music that they hear over the mere noise of the breaking tide. Above, stars in certain places; along the shore roads, cars carrying people on uncertain errands, sordid and sacred and all the kinds in between. Halogen-lit, a woman gets down from her all-wheel-drive velocipede, enters through an obeying door a cyclopean store to buy unintelligent fresh fish and other objects whether formerly alive or formerly dead, she comes out again, a poor man calls to her, selling his no-news- paper; the disastrous head- lines smile and nod, they announce the plans of steel patriots and undertakers, ad-men and fallen vice-generals, doping their stolen crusades. But the woman has learned, as I have learned, as all of us must keep learning if we are to be good subjects, how to make of a newspaper the mask of a locust, calmly put it on, and begin once more to eat everything up.

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic") I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. III Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. IV Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind. V Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ... VI Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything VII Prepared a sinister mate For her — so gaily great — A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. IX Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, X Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, XI Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning to the sea, then turned right along the surf rounded a naked headland and returned along the inlet shore: it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high, crisp in the running sand, some breakthroughs of sun but after a bit continuous overcast: the walk liberating, I was released from forms, from the perpendiculars, straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds of thought into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends of sight: I allow myself eddies of meaning: yield to a direction of significance running like a stream through the geography of my work: you can find in my sayings swerves of action like the inlet’s cutting edge: there are dunes of motion, organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance in the overall wandering of mirroring mind: but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond the account: in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of primrose more or less dispersed; disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows of dunes, irregular swamps of reeds, though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ... predominantly reeds: I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines: as manifold events of sand change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape tomorrow, so I am willing to go along, to accept the becoming thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish no walls: by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek to undercreek: but there are no lines, though change in that transition is clear as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out, allowed to occur over a wider range than mental lines can keep: the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low: black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk of air and, earlier, of sun, waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact, caught always in the event of change: a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals and ate to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab, picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits: risk is full: every living thing in siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears the shallows, darts to shore to stab—what? I couldn’t see against the black mudflats—a frightened fiddler crab? the news to my left over the dunes and reeds and bayberry clumps was fall: thousands of tree swallows gathering for flight: an order held in constant change: a congregation rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable as one event, not chaos: preparations for flight from winter, cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps, beaks at the bayberries a perception full of wind, flight, curve, sound: the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness: the “field” of action with moving, incalculable center: in the smaller view, order tight with shape: blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab: snail shell: pulsations of order in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed, broken down, transferred through membranes to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together and against, of millions of events: this, so that I make no form of formlessness: orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain the top of a dune, the swallows could take flight—some other fields of bayberry could enter fall berryless) and there is serenity: no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan, or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept: terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities of escape open: no route shut, except in the sudden loss of all routes: I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will not run to that easy victory: still around the looser, wider forces work: I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Obscurest night involv'd the sky, Th' Atlantic billows roar'd, When such a destin'd wretch as I, Wash'd headlong from on board, Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, His floating home for ever left. No braver chief could Albion boast Than he with whom he went, Nor ever ship left Albion's coast, With warmer wishes sent. He lov'd them both, but both in vain, Nor him beheld, nor her again. Not long beneath the whelming brine, Expert to swim, he lay; Nor soon he felt his strength decline, Or courage die away; But wag'd with death a lasting strife, Supported by despair of life. He shouted: nor his friends had fail'd To check the vessel's course, But so the furious blast prevail'd, That, pitiless perforce, They left their outcast mate behind, And scudded still before the wind. Some succour yet they could afford; And, such as storms allow, The cask, the coop, the floated cord, Delay'd not to bestow. But he (they knew) nor ship, nor shore, Whate'er they gave, should visit more. Nor, cruel as it seem'd, could he Their haste himself condemn, Aware that flight, in such a sea, Alone could rescue them; Yet bitter felt it still to die Deserted, and his friends so nigh. He long survives, who lives an hour In ocean, self-upheld; And so long he, with unspent pow'r, His destiny repell'd; And ever, as the minutes flew, Entreated help, or cried—Adieu! At length, his transient respite past, His comrades, who before Had heard his voice in ev'ry blast, Could catch the sound no more. For then, by toil subdued, he drank The stifling wave, and then he sank. No poet wept him: but the page Of narrative sincere; That tells his name, his worth, his age, Is wet with Anson's tear. And tears by bards or heroes shed Alike immortalize the dead. I therefore purpose not, or dream, Descanting on his fate, To give the melancholy theme A more enduring date: But misery still delights to trace Its semblance in another's case. No voice divine the storm allay'd, No light propitious shone; When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, We perish'd, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

From the unfathomed, farthest away from the light, from the sea’s iron guardedness they come — pin-eyed, with flesh like tree bark. Their jaws are gorgeously spiked, ragged with toothpick teeth, goon teeth, prison-bar teeth. O anglerfish, vampire fish, oarfish, goonch. A strange fish holds himself upright and fast to the park railings. He is white knuckled. His eyes focus upwards as if counting or reciting, tugging at the brain’s stubborn pinions. When you ask if there’s somewhere he needs to get to, he only sets his jaw harder. You both know that if he acknowledges you, he’ll fall. Every one of your dreams is about the president, however tangentially. Each morning, 
pre-waking, mucid insects seem to attach themselves to your collarbone and gnaw in at the marrow. What if we could all say whatever came first to mind, whenever we wanted to? No perusal.Scullion! Arse-wipe! Warp-faced pignut! Invincible as a body that’s snug in the womb. What if we could all get whatever we wanted, whenever — as in the fairy tale? On the beach at Marazion the surf is spangled with mackerel scales. The sands heave with stranded bodies, underwater silver bullets, drying and curling up in the winter light, so close to home.

Big Boy came Carrying a mermaid On his shoulders And the mermaid Had her tail Curved Beneath his arm. Being a fisher boy, He’d found a fish To carry— Half fish, Half girl To marry.