178 Ocean poems

No reverie begs “light” in the blind eye. Reverie says: dig this depth-of-blank Deeper. Dig deeper With the Whale below the white-capped waves— A twitch of his tail, a twitch of his white tail Birthed from ocean-bed the wave That broke calm water into each cracked plank Of the harpooner’s boat, made that man sway, And cast him on the spear his arm meant to cast At you. Beneath the sun’s evil weight Men burn nightwards but never darken Past night. There’s always the moon’s hook On still water to deny them. But Whale, you dive down Until the ocean’s ground begs you solid, “Stop.” Whale, you do not stop. You beat your head against the jagged rocks. Blind in depths so dark light itself is blind, You knock your head against the rocks to see And scratch the god-itch from your thoughts. Flame is jealous of flame, once lit, it ever Reaches higher. You wait, match-tip, White Whale. I see how you wait in silence for silence To say:write it in, tell me who I am now.

Somewhere, people must still do things like fetch water from wells in buckets, then pour it out for those animals that, long domesticated, would likely perish before figuring out how to get for themselves. That dog, for example, whose refusal to leave my side I mistook, as a child, for loyalty — when all along it was just blind ... What is it about vulnerability that can make the hand draw back, sometimes, and can sometimes seem the catalyst for rendering the hand into sheer force, destructive?Don’t you see how you’ve burnt almost all of it, all the tenderness, away

I drove through the narrow Gods— privet and cholesterol, or Irish creamery butter as the waiter called it, as it shaved another day off my life. There was no salt and antimony, just lumpy roads through Meath and Leitrim. The sky was a show of flashing mirrors as day broke on Rosses. Tide out and weed like cow pies on the shore. The punt down and the EEC on the horizon, as I read in the guidebook about pilgrims climbing St. Patrick’s barefoot every summer. Out of the fog a man in Wranglers and spurred boots, clean-shaven, a cigarette in hand, waved me down. “Scrum faced house at the end of the bay.” “Hop in,” I said.“You lookin’ for where John Wayne made

& sea swell, hiss of   incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its nothing else: nothing in the above visible except water: water and always the white self-destroying bloom of   wavebreak &, upclose roil, & here, on what’s left of   land, ticking of   stays against empty flagpoles, low tide, free day, nothing being memorialized here today — memories float, yes, over the place but not memories any of   us now among the living possess — open your hands — let go the scrap metal with the laughter — let go the upstairs neighbor you did not protect — they took him away — let go how frightened you knew he was all along while you went on with your day — your day overflowing with time and place — they came and got him — there are manners for every kind of event — he stopped reading and looked up when they came in — didn’t anyone tell you you would never feel at home — that there is a form of   slavery in everything — and when was it in   your admittedly short life you were permitted to believe that this lasted forever — remove   your   hands from your pockets — take out that laundry list, that receipt for everything you pawned last night — decide whom to blame — stick to your story — exclude expectation of   heavenly reward — exclude the milk of human kindness — poisoned from the start — yes — who ever expected that to be the mistake — with all the murderers and miracle workers — with the hovering spidery fairy tales — kites, angels, missiles, evening papers, yellow stars — clouds — those were houses that are his eyes — those were lives that are his eyes — those are families, those are privacies, those are details — those are reparation agreements, summary judgments, those are multiplications on the face of   the earth that are — those are the forests, the coal seams, the carbon sinks that are his — as they turn into carbon sources — his — and the festering wounds that are — and the granary that burned — and the quick blow administered to make it painless, so- called — his eyes his   yes   his blows his seed’s first insertion into this our only soil — &   the flower, the cut flower in my bouquet here, made from the walk we took this morning, aimless, as if   free, where you asked me to marry you, &   the loaf   of barley, millet and wheat I was able, as a matter of course, to bring to the table, fresh- baked, in life.

There are two memories of tides: one for the deep blackness that split away from the mother sea and one for sea that found itself in the daybreaks of rivers. Yet it was all one sea tracked by comets and the Elegant Tern, seals in speckled pod-shaped skins, and whales, opening their small eyes when the hands of people drew fish out of the salt. Geologists tell us that the sea split millions of years ago before the Yoemem, Yoremem, Kunkaak, O-Otam curled their tongues around the names of themselves and raised the conch shell to their lips, so that the sound of nature became human, too: kalifornia vaawe Then the sea was measured and divided into leagues. The Spanish ships called it dangerous because the sea tore in two ways, tide and rivers, so they contained it in maps written on dead animal skins with ink made from dried octopus blood Mar de la Kalifornia Golfo de California

At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis, Its fugue-like swells create and recreate One image in an idiot concentration. From horizon to horizon, this desert With the eye athirst for something stable When off to southeast-ward— It was a plane all right, or had been, A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her. Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure If it were ours or had been one of theirs. That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor, Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god. What did it mean? They thought of night fleets In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon: The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles, The pause, the roar like a night freight And the near misses building their faery forests. Where were these giants? The sea offered A single clue, a symbol; no explanation. Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons As if jealous of giving up secured positions The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.

I go down to the edge of the sea. How everything shines in the morning light! The cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam, the opened, blue mussels, moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred— and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone. It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First you figure out what each one means by itself, the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight. Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine, The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,— O, I am sick for home! The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air, And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,— When will the good ship come? The wretched stumps all charred and burned, And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,— Why is the world so old? The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly, Where are the dead untold? The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog, The huge stranded hulk and the floating log, Sorrow with life began! And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore, O the wind, and the wind, for evermore! What will become of man?

As at the far edge of circling the country, facing suddenly the other ocean, the boundless edge of what I had wanted to know, I stepped into my answers’ shadow ocean, the tightening curl of the corners of outdated old paperbacks, breakers, a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around my ankles sinking in my stand taken that the horizon written by the spin of my compass is that this is is not enough a point to turn around on, is like a skin that falls short of edge as a rug, that covers a no longer natural spot, no longer existent to live on from, the map of my person come to the end of, but not done. That country crossed was what I could imagine, and that little spit of answer is the shadow— not the ocean which casts it— that I step next into to be cleansed of question. But not of seeking …it as if simplified for the seeking, come to its end at this body.

Haze of wave spume towards Small Point, Seguin Island Light like a whale's spout— maybe life washes itself here, cools off. It never comes clean. See all the sails up and full in the windy parade of skin and sand and brine. Soon the rocks will pluck each wave's feathers. Soon the beach like the moon, waning, will be 1/8th its size. Somewhere else—maybe Ireland—the tide will bottom out then. For now the sun blesses the bodies at home in theirs, and those less so, to ruin and ruin's aftermath— whatever that is—and the waves rolling in, little snowplows, nimbus in miniature; how the beach fishhooks east, one child— is that mine, or some spirit I was one more usher of?—face up, arms and legs scraping a temporary angel in the sand.