178 Ocean poems

Put an ear to the light at fall of dark and you will hear nothing. This pale luminescence that drifts in upon them makes a blue bole of their caves, a scare of their scything tails. They tell in the bubbling dark of images that come in upon them when light spreads like an oil slick and sea fans that once were their refuge turn away. Now there is no dark dark enough for their silver tails, scatter of color (like coins massively piling in the lap of a miser) that was, in the day, their pride. How hugely here we belong. This is their song in the silting drift of the reef. They have never seen the moon nor the black scut of night, stars spread like plankton in their beastly infinities.

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main,— The venturous bark that flings On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare, Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair. Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl! And every chambered cell, Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed,— Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed! Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door, Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea, Cast from her lap, forlorn! From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn! While on mine ear it rings, Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:— Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

It is the fish that bring them first. Cod in such numbers as to seem endless. Cod to fill the nets and bellies of hungry Europeans with the tender white flesh. Cod, it seems to them, without end. They fill the ships, salting the fish down in barrels, til the hull is full, and head back home. This wet cod-fishing goes on for years, far out in the Banks, with only an occasional stop on land. We dry our fish in the sun cure it in smoke-houses and sure enough, the foreigners hear about it. Soon they need a land base to dry the cod which weighs less than when wet tastes better, too it is these dreams of cod that first bring the French to land dreams of cod the gold of the sea that will fill their bellies and their pockets

Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads At last we came into the unleashed wind; The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread. Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves Flung yellow foam and sucked at disheveled sand. Small fish stank in the sun, and nervous droves Of cloud hastened their shadows over bay and land. Beyond the NO DUMPING sign in its surf of cans And the rotting boat with nettles to the rails, The horse dung garlanded with jeweling flies And papers blown like a fleet of shipless sails, We pushed into an overworld of wind and light Where sky unfettered ran wild from earth to noon, And the tethered heart broke loose and rose like a kite From sands that borrowed diamonds from the sun. We were empty and pure as shells that air-drenched hour, Heedless as waves that swell at the shore and fall, Pliant as sea-grass, the rapt inheritors Of a land without memory, where tide erases all.

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them— Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze. They are the same aren’t they, The presumed landscape and the dream of home Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping, Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes Became so extraneous and so near To create a foreground of quiet knowledge In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that Will sign for old age And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again. The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”; The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles: Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others. During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that The great wave of the past, compounded in derision, Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike In falsetto starlight like “purity” Of design that had been the first danger sign To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui! How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time, The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written Bearing to a final point of folly and doom The wisdom of these generations. Look at what you’ve done to the landscape— The ice cube, the olive— There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things Extending all the way along the river on both sides With the end left for thoughts on construction That are always turning to alps and thresholds Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory. We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest: Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to An impossible “calque” of reality, than “The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle, Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve, All in one direction. You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one, What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal. But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning There can be no further discussion. And the river pursues its lonely course With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur. “The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.” All this came to pass eons ago. Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws: A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake, An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance. Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass, Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself— For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption, Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way, For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed, To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years. Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back, For standing still means death, and life is moving on, Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.

O Wave God      who broke through me today Sea Bream massive pink and silver cool swimming down with me watching staying away from the spear Volcano belly Keeper who lifted this island for our own beaded bodies adornment and sprinkles us all with his laugh— ash in the eve mist, or smoke, on the bare high limits— underwater lava flows easing to coral holes filled with striped feeding swimmers O Sky Gods      cartwheeling out of   Pacific turning rainsqualls over like lids on us then shine on our sodden— (scanned out a rainbow today at the cow drinking trough sluicing off LAKHS of crystal Buddha Fields right on the hair of the arm!) Who wavers right now in the bamboo: a half-gone waning moon. drank down a bowlful of shochu in praise of Antares gazing far up the lanes of Sagittarius richest stream of our sky— a cup to the center of the galaxy! and let the eyes stray right-angling the pitch of the Milky Way: horse-heads   rings clouds      too distant to be slide free. on the crest of the wave. Each night O Earth Mother I have wrappt my hand over the jut of your cobra-hood sleeping; left my ear All night long by your mouth. O   All Gods   tides   capes   currents Flows and spirals of pool and powers— As we hoe the field let sweet potato grow. And as sit us all down when we may To consider the Dharma bring with a flower and a glimmer. Let us all sleep in peace    together. Bless Masa and me as we marry at new moon         on the crater This summer. VIII 40067

I have just returned from a visit to my pier Often I am permitted to return to my pier For a long time I would go to pier early So much depends upon a pier This is an old pier I celebrate my pier, and what I assume . . . I had a pier There is a certain slant of pier On woman's first disobedience, and the pier Christmas won't be Christmas without the pier I wandered lonely as a pier Pier was spiteful This is just to say I have eaten the pier

At the mouth of the river, Moon, stars, an Arctic calm, The twin lights at the end of the piers Revolving with the smoothness We expect of supernatural machinery. Seen from down here on the beach The harbored ocean slowly tilts, Like a mirror discreetly manhandled By night from the giant room It was supposed to occupy forever. The mind says now, but the stars On their angelic gimbals roll And fade, a tide of constellations Breaking nowhere, every night About this time. Strike up the band. In the tumbledown bar, the singer Has fallen from stardom and grace, But though her interests nowadays Are wholly secular, she can Still refer back to the angels, And knowing that song, we share A moment with the saved before We leave to make the crossing. No captain, no ferry, but Cross we shall, believe you me.

On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o’er the channel reared, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretched forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. Imperial lord of the high southern coast! From thy projecting head-land I would mark Far in the east the shades of night disperse, Melting and thinned, as from the dark blue wave Emerging, brilliant rays of arrowy light Dart from the horizon; when the glorious sun Just lifts above it his resplendent orb. Advances now, with feathery silver touched, The rippling tide of flood; glisten the sands, While, inmates of the chalky clefts that scar Thy sides precipitous, with shrill harsh cry, Their white wings glancing in the level beam, The terns, and gulls, and tarrocks, seek their food, And thy rough hollows echo to the voice Of the gray choughs, and ever restless daws, With clamor, not unlike the chiding hounds, While the lone shepherd, and his baying dog, Drive to thy turfy crest his bleating flock. The high meridian of the day is past, And Ocean now, reflecting the calm Heaven, Is of cerulean hue; and murmurs low The tide of ebb, upon the level sands. The sloop, her angular canvas shifting still, Catches the light and variable airs That but a little crisp the summer sea, Dimpling its tranquil surface.

1896 They christened my brother of old— And a saintly name he bears— They gave him his place to hold At the head of the belfry-stairs, Where the minster-towers stand And the breeding kestrels cry. Would I change with my brother a league inland? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I ! In the flush of the hot June prime, O’er sleek flood-tides afire, I hear him hurry the chime To the bidding of checked Desire; Till the sweated ringers tire And the wild bob-majors die. Could I wait for my turn in the godly choir? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! When the smoking scud is blown— When the greasy wind-rack lowers— Apart and at peace and alone, He counts the changeless hours. He wars with darkling Powers (I war with, a darkling sea); Would he stoop to my work in the gusty mirk? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not he! There was never a priest to pray, There was never a hand to toll, When they made me guard of the bay, And moored me over the shoal. I rock, I reel, and I roll— My four great hammers ply— Could I speak or be still at the Church’s will? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! The landward marks have failed, The fog-bank glides unguessed, The seaward lights are veiled, The spent deep feigns her rest: But my ear is laid to her breast, I lift to the swell—I cry! Could I wait in sloth on the Church’s oath? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! At the careless end of night I thrill to the nearing screw; I turn in the clearing light And I call to the drowsy crew; And the mud boils foul and blue As the blind bow backs away. Will they give me their thanks if they clear the banks? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not they! The beach-pools cake and skim, The bursting spray-heads freeze, I gather on crown and rim The grey, grained ice of the seas, Where, sheathed from bitt to trees, The plunging colliers lie. Would I barter my place for the Church’s grace? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! Through the blur of the whirling snow, Or the black of the inky sleet, The lanterns gather and grow, And I look for the homeward fleet. Rattle of block and sheet— ‘Ready about—stand by!’ Shall I ask them a fee ere they fetch the quay? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I! I dip and I surge and I swing In the rip of the racing tide, By the gates of doom I sing, On the horns of death I ride. A ship-length overside, Between the course and the sand, Fretted and bound I bide Peril whereof I cry. Would I change with my brother a league inland? (Shoal! ’Ware shoal!) Not I!