178 Ocean poems

winter sea over my shoes shadows and bright round stones at san gregorio every wave turns a season forests adrift empty shells memory of fire so faraway in the mountains and canyons silent pools raise my faces by early tide slight my hand shoulders almost ashore light breaks over the plovers certain steps my traces blood, bone, stone turn natural and heavy waves rush the sand

A queer thing about those waters: there are no Birds there, or hardly any. I did not miss them, I do not remember Missing them, or thinking it uncanny. The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone, A quarry outraged by hulls. We took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness Of the light, the silence, and the water’s stillness. But this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes. This hurt, and goes on hurting: The venomous soft jelly, the undersides. We could stand the world if it were hard all over.

In the ocean one fish swallows the other: a geometric progression of loss. You are bigger than I. The calamity of love swelling out larger than us. And what destiny partakes of our dilemma? Swallows the cause and effect: eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged parts wanting to breathe and wanting. There is no gentle sense to this. Is there? Only a kind of terror at the chain of events, the scale of loss, the ordered destruction one against the other— all that something larger awaits its moment.

The world below the brine, Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf, Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water, Dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom, The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray, Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do, The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere, The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

It was the schooner Hesperus, That sailed the wintry sea; And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr, To bear him company. Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds, That ope in the month of May. The skipper he stood beside the helm, His pipe was in his mouth, And he watched how the veering flaw did blow The smoke now West, now South. Then up and spake an old Sailòr, Had sailed to the Spanish Main, "I pray thee, put into yonder port, For I fear a hurricane. "Last night, the moon had a golden ring, And to-night no moon we see!" The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe, And a scornful laugh laughed he. Colder and louder blew the wind, A gale from the Northeast, The snow fell hissing in the brine, And the billows frothed like yeast. Down came the storm, and smote amain The vessel in its strength; She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed, Then leaped her cable's length. "Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr, And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale That ever wind did blow." He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat Against the stinging blast; He cut a rope from a broken spar, And bound her to the mast. "O father! I hear the church-bells ring, Oh say, what may it be?" "'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!" — And he steered for the open sea. "O father! I hear the sound of guns, Oh say, what may it be?" "Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!" "O father! I see a gleaming light, Oh say, what may it be?" But the father answered never a word, A frozen corpse was he. Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark, With his face turned to the skies, The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes. Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That savèd she might be; And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave On the Lake of Galilee. And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe. And ever the fitful gusts between A sound came from the land; It was the sound of the trampling surf On the rocks and the hard sea-sand. The breakers were right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from her deck. She struck where the white and fleecy waves Looked soft as carded wool, But the cruel rocks, they gored her side Like the horns of an angry bull. Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board; Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank, Ho! ho! the breakers roared! At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a drifting mast. The salt sea was frozen on her breast, The salt tears in her eyes; And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed, On the billows fall and rise. Such was the wreck of the Hesperus, In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from a death like this, On the reef of Norman's Woe!

(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963) I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned. Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over, Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground. (But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.) This crushing of people is something we live with. Daily, by unaccountable whim Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death, Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame, Men and women break the pledge of breath: And now under water, gone all jetsam and small In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull. (Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts? The only animal cursed with responsible sleep, We trace disaster always to our own acts. I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep: All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.) We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor At first light: with better grace than men In their movements the vessels run to their labors Working the fields that the tide has made green again; Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens, Although by a wise superstition these are called After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine. The crushing of any ship has always been held In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled. I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet And dark and lost were their private, funny derision And I can judge then what dark compression Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below. ( Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams, Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last—

Two women on the lone wet strand (The wind's out with a will to roam) The waves wage war on rocks and sand, (And a ship is long due home.) The sea sprays in the women's eyes— (Hearts can writhe like the sea's wild foam) Lower descend the tempestuous skies, (For the wind's out with a will to roam.) "O daughter, thine eyes be better than mine," (The waves ascend high as yonder dome) "North or south is there never a sign?" (And a ship is long due home.) They watched there all the long night through— (The wind's out with a will to roam) Wind and rain and sorrow for two— (And heaven on the long reach home.)

Thirty seconds of yellow lichen. Thirty seconds of coil and surge, fern and froth, thirty seconds of salt, rock, fog, spray. Clouds moving slowly to the left— A door in a rock through which you could see __ another rock, laved by the weedy tide. Like filming breathing—thirty seconds of tidal drag, fingering the smaller stones down the black beach—what color was that, aquamarine? Starfish spread their salmon-colored hands. __ I stood and I shot them. I stood and I watched them right after I shot them: thirty seconds of smashed sea while the real sea thrashed and heaved— They were the most boring movies ever made. I wanted to mount them together and press Play. __ Thirty seconds of waves colliding. Kelp with its open attitudes, seals riding the swells, curved in a row just under the water— the sea, over and over. Before it's over.

Sets the folds in alignment; this a shallow, a constitution of drops that moves to displace itself and unconsciously reverts to image. In such a state, the wave has become a setting— a table across which cups with propositions rolled inside them are passed. The passage of cups does not limit the range of potential outcomes, and yet at no point does the wave dissolve into abstraction. The shades are drawn and we are overwhelmed by flags crossing the black divan. An axis of rotation, gliding a fraction of an inch and yet unveiling its total mass. Advancing, the disc of its body shimmers. Alighting on the sand, it reveals itself in a cluster of pulses. Dilated, it lifts from the sea floor: fine spokes radiating on a wheel. It passes between bands of bright water, a kiss or a plow.

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time. If they ask you how it felt, say solitary, at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet, then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed, and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes. If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman, who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed, and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea— stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman. If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest, people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink. Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear and beg for hours with his cup empty. Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun. When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking, How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní, indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger, giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.