178 Ocean poems

I saw a ship of martial build (Her standards set, her brave apparel on) Directed as by madness mere Against a stolid iceberg steer, Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down. The impact made huge ice-cubes fall Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck; But that one avalanche was all— No other movement save the foundering wreck. Along the spurs of ridges pale, Not any slenderest shaft and frail, A prism over glass-green gorges lone, Toppled; or lace of traceries fine, Nor pendant drops in grot or mine Were jarred, when the stunned ship went down. Nor sole the gulls in cloud that wheeled Circling one snow-flanked peak afar, But nearer fowl the floes that skimmed And crystal beaches, felt no jar. No thrill transmitted stirred the lock Of jack-straw needle-ice at base; Towers undermined by waves—the block Atilt impending—kept their place. Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges Slipt never, when by loftier edges Through very inertia overthrown, The impetuous ship in bafflement went down. Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast, With mortal damps self-overcast; Exhaling still thy dankish breath— Adrift dissolving, bound for death; Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one— A lumbering lubbard loitering slow, Impingers rue thee and go down, Sounding thy precipice below, Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls Along thy dead indifference of walls.

1 As I ebb’d with the ocean of life, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you Paumanok, Where they rustle up hoarse and sibilant, Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her castaways, I musing late in the autumn day, gazing off southward, Held by this electric self out of the pride of which I utter poems, Was seiz’d by the spirit that trails in the lines underfoot, The rim, the sediment that stands for all the water and all the land of the globe. Fascinated, my eyes reverting from the south, dropt, to follow those slender windrows, Chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, Scum, scales from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types. 2 As I wend to the shores I know not, As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d, As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me, As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer, I too but signify at the utmost a little wash’d-up drift, A few sands and dead leaves to gather, Gather, and merge myself as part of the sands and drift. O baffled, balk’d, bent to the very earth, Oppress’d with myself that I have dared to open my mouth, Aware now that amid all that blab whose echoes recoil upon me I have not once had the least idea who or what I am, But that before all my arrogant poems the real Me stands yet untouch’d, untold, altogether unreach’d, Withdrawn far, mocking me with mock-congratulatory signs and bows, With peals of distant ironical laughter at every word I have written, Pointing in silence to these songs, and then to the sand beneath. I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can, Nature here in sight of the sea taking advantage of me to dart upon me and sting me, Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing at all. 3 You oceans both, I close with you, We murmur alike reproachfully rolling sands and drift, knowing not why, These little shreds indeed standing for you and me and all. You friable shore with trails of debris, You fish-shaped island, I take what is underfoot, What is yours is mine my father. I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores, I too am but a trail of drift and debris, I too leave little wrecks upon you, you fish-shaped island. I throw myself upon your breast my father, I cling to you so that you cannot unloose me, I hold you so firm till you answer me something. Kiss me my father, Touch me with your lips as I touch those I love, Breathe to me while I hold you close the secret of the murmuring I envy. 4 Ebb, ocean of life, (the flow will return,) Cease not your moaning you fierce old mother, Endlessly cry for your castaways, but fear not, deny not me, Rustle not up so hoarse and angry against my feet as I touch you or gather from you. I mean tenderly by you and all, I gather for myself and for this phantom looking down where we lead, and following me and mine. Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles, (See, from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last, See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling,) Tufts of straw, sands, fragments, Buoy’d hither from many moods, one contradicting another, From the storm, the long calm, the darkness, the swell, Musing, pondering, a breath, a briny tear, a dab of liquid or soil, Up just as much out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown, A limp blossom or two, torn, just as much over waves floating, drifted at random, Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of Nature, Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets, We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you, You up there walking or sitting, Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.

Rain commenced, and wind did. A crippled ship slid ashore. Our swimmer’s limbs went heavy. The sand had been flattened. The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled. The maritime forest, extracted. Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish. The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight. The threads of the jellyfish, spent. Disaster weirdly neatened the beach. We cultivated the debris field. Castaway trash, our treasure. Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy. A bicycle exoskeleton without wheels, grasshopper green. Our dead ten speed. We rested in red mangrove and sheltered in sheets. Our bruises blushed backwards, our blisters did. is it true is it true God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better. We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled. We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict. We were harmed, and then we healed.

And the black water under the boats with their pools of bilge rainbowed out like rinds of steak fat, the salt thick in my nostrils, but pleasant, too: details I still remember from Bishop’s poem, everything else about it lost. At the docks, I watched my friend slip in her rubber boots; the wide, wet planks glossy with mosses. You must walk duckfooted to get to the boats, the black and orange fishing barrels, the air with its tang of rusted metals. There are always hooks and anchors to be found, nets and scrapings of wood planed by chisel, the way my great-grandmother was said to have worked, employed as a shipwright on the city’s waterways in the ’30s according to the newspaper clipping my grandmother photocopies for me each Christmas. The description of her gunmetal hair and slim torso clad in overalls, the hands she held out for the Times reporter (“Callused,” he noted, “strong as a man’s”) does not recall the woman I remember for her farm in Bothell before it became a Seattle suburb, helping me gather raspberries from the long canes she planted by her porch. We spent an afternoon together sweating in the same long-sleeved checkered shirts she’d sewn us, according to the photo I no longer have, and cannot remember whether is the source or confirmation of this memory: only the papery, gray-green streaks of road dust on the canes, a bowl of chipped porcelain inside of which were raspberries. Very red, very sweet, furred like my friend’s upper lip I remember between my teeth as we stood on the docks. The smell of iron and winter mist, her mouth like nothing I have tasted since.

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water’s edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual Motion machine of the waves. Everything still Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish To hold hands? The wind cutting through our clothes Cleansed and burned, the chill off the Atlantic An ache we courted in our dumbstruck talk: Callow, expectant, what wouldn’t love give? Cavalcanti’s ray from Mars, Dante’s wheel that moves The planets and the stars, how nervous We were, awkward and shivering: “Like this, Do you like it like this?” Up all night, Then waking to the smell of flannel and sweat, We lay grateful, winded, goosefleshed in the chill, Our own atmosphere rich and breathable: We drank round the clock, embracing extremes, Too hurried and heartsore to think of time… Out fishing after midnight, we watched schools of squid Slide and shimmer, tentacles tight-wrapped Around our gig’s hooks: Yanked from the water, They spouted jets of ink, then pulsed and quivered And faded to dead-white, their eyes, resigned and sober, Opening wider and wider…Ten years more, And will either of us remember That ink sticky on our hands, the moon-glare Rippling as we knelt underneath the pier And scrubbed and scrubbed our hands in the dark water?

An oyster filters fifty gallons a day cleans the water builds itself a shell does it know it's beautiful probably not beauty isn't the point for an oyster the filtering is the point

The shoreline is always moving they measured it once and then had to measure again because it had moved i find that honest the shoreline doesn't pretend to be fixed

The bay at low tide is a different bay smaller and less dramatic and full of things the high tide hid i like low tide for this the revealed parts the honest version

The pacific is too big to understand i stand at the edge of it and feel appropriately small that's all i came for the appropriate smallness