178 Ocean poems

I Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering. And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves, The waves fold thunder on the sand; And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog, Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached By time and the elements; but there is a line You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. II —And yet this great wink of eternity, Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings, Samite sheeted and processioned where Her undinal vast belly moonward bends, Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love; Take this Sea, whose diapason knells On scrolls of silver snowy sentences, The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends As her demeanors motion well or ill, All but the pieties of lovers’ hands. And onward, as bells off San Salvador Salute the crocus lustres of the stars, In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,— Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, Complete the dark confessions her veins spell. Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours, And hasten while her penniless rich palms Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,— Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire, Close round one instant in one floating flower. Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe. O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise. III Infinite consanguinity it bears— This tendered theme of you that light Retrieves from sea plains where the sky Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones; While ribboned water lanes I wind Are laved and scattered with no stroke Wide from your side, whereto this hour The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands. And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise,— Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave unto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed, Presumes no carnage, but this single change,— Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ... IV Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe Chilled albatross’s white immutability) No stream of greater love advancing now Than, singing, this mortality alone Through clay aflow immortally to you. All fragrance irrefragably, and claim Madly meeting logically in this hour And region that is ours to wreathe again, Portending eyes and lips and making told The chancel port and portion of our June— Shall they not stem and close in our own steps Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell? In signature of the incarnate word The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown And widening noon within your breast for gathering All bright insinuations that my years have caught For islands where must lead inviolably Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,— In this expectant, still exclaim receive The secret oar and petals of all love. V Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime, Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast Together in one merciless white blade— The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits. —As if too brittle or too clear to touch! The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars. One frozen trackless smile ... What words Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved And changed ... “There’s Nothing like this in the world,” you say, Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look Too, into that godless cleft of sky Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing. “—And never to quite understand!” No, In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed Nothing so flagless as this piracy. But now Draw in your head, alone and too tall here. Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know: Draw in your head and sleep the long way home. VI Where icy and bright dungeons lift Of swimmers their lost morning eyes, And ocean rivers, churning, shift Green borders under stranger skies, Steadily as a shell secretes Its beating leagues of monotone, Or as many waters trough the sun’s Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone; O rivers mingling toward the sky And harbor of the phoenix’ breast— My eyes pressed black against the prow, —Thy derelict and blinded guest Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke, I cannot claim: let thy waves rear More savage than the death of kings, Some splintered garland for the seer. Beyond siroccos harvesting The solstice thunders, crept away, Like a cliff swinging or a sail Flung into April’s inmost day— Creation’s blithe and petalled word To the lounged goddess when she rose Conceding dialogue with eyes That smile unsearchable repose— Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle, —Unfolded floating dais before Which rainbows twine continual hair— Belle Isle, white echo of the oar! The imaged Word, it is, that holds Hushed willows anchored in its glow. It is the unbetrayable reply Whose accent no farewell can know.

People looking at the sea, makes them feel less terrible about themselves, the sea's behaving abominably, seems never satisfied, what it throws away it dashes down then wants back, yanks back. Comparatively, thinks one vice president, what are my frauds but nudged along misunderstandings already there? I can't believe I ever worried about my betrayals, thinks the analyst benefitting facially from the sea's raged-up mist. Obviously I'm not the only one suffering an identity crisis knows the boy who wants to be a lawyer no more. Nothing can stay long, cogitates the dog, so maybe a life of fetch is not a wasted life. And the sea heaves and cleaves and seethes, shoots snot out, goes to bed only to wake shouting in the mansion of the night, pacing, pacing, making tea then spilling it, sudden outloud laughter snort, Oh what the heck, I probably drove myself crazy, thinks the sea, kissing all those strangers, forgiving them no matter what, liars in confession, vomitters of plastics and fossil fuels but what a stricken elixir I've become even to my becalmed depths, while through its head swim a million fishes seemingly made of light eating each other.

Do not allow me to sink, I said To a top floating ribbon of kelp. As I was lifted on each wave And made to slide into the vale I wanted not to drown. I wanted To make it all right with my dear, To tell my cat I’ll be away, To have them all destroyed, the poems Which were not objects enough on their own Even entertainment value. I wanted Through my saltwater breath to leave A bubble or two in its abstract sphere On the surface of their delicious minds. • Outside the window of the world The midges dance above a bush Making a complex music holding A language for which there is no key. That they are dancing there helps us To communicate even in the negative. • Time’s not funny enough to dash My hopes. I go in wide open To deal with its little team of tenses To try to win myself a stopped Place for an instant while I think. • I have left my place to come to speak To you. Now from this other place Inhabited by the very beast I brace myself to speak with good Tone that will carry. I love you. How does that sound? I was only testing. • Who murmurs me their secret name? Is it you? If you could do that You certainly would be better than me. Who I am, the name I hunt After has so far escaped me. The grammarsow or the waving rook Surely must think of me as somebody. • Ben Narnain was a love of mine, Going up beside the Soordook Burn And bracken and bog-myrtle. The water Ouzel dipped at the pools. The twite The mountain linnet caught the eye. From the top I saw the sword of the long Loch lying in its scabbard of hills. • Ideosyncracies of the way We speak eventually become Currency and only by Art Skip the expanded chest of rhetoric To speak nearly from one to another. • Younger my brash prison of joy Seemed to do me well enough. Now made modern with its new Benefits of experience I can hardly catch a glimpse Of that young sun and tree-top. My cell’s window has risen too high. • Is who’s listening who I guess It is? My dear it is so long Since I held your heart near. I wanted just to speak but now Hearing your little ear I know So well near me I am put off. Anyhow I was only going to try To assail some aspect of Reality. • The blemish is this, I think, I could I would have if I had known I really could but me knowing It maybe too well was not sure What it was I could and the words Were all against me and would not help. • Listening through the microscopes of power I heard a rebec under an olive Sing to me that certainly My wife would leave me and go down To live on the prose plains again. • This is a book. It is blue. Those are pages. They are black and white. That is a famous man. The worms Do not know his name or color. • I am here very much at four A.M. Am I in a deeper night Than you whose eyeballs observe terrible Encounters under your dream’s hill? I am only still up out of sleep Trying to burnish an implement With my mind’s elbow grease to pack In English and send off to you For you to put on the mantlepiece.

The tide rises, the tide falls, The twilight darkens, the curlew calls; Along the sea-sands damp and brown The traveller hastens toward the town, And the tide rises, the tide falls. Darkness settles on roofs and walls, But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls; The little waves, with their soft, white hands, Efface the footprints in the sands, And the tide rises, the tide falls. The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls; The day returns, but nevermore Returns the traveller to the shore, And the tide rises, the tide falls.

O patient shore, that canst not go to meet Thy love, the restless sea, how comfortest Thou all thy loneliness? Art thou at rest, When, loosing his strong arms from round thy feet, He turns away? Know’st thou, however sweet That other shore may be, that to thy breast He must return? And when in sterner test He folds thee to a heart which does not beat, Wraps thee in ice, and gives no smile, no kiss, To break long wintry days, still dost thou miss Naught from thy trust? Still, wait, unfaltering, The higher, warmer waves which leap in spring? O sweet, wise shore, to be so satisfied! O heart, learn from the shore! Love has a tide!

I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid whose verses like the Romanian coast roll along so wide and subdued: waves that wait for the ice to break. My poet, you that make what I sing to thousand years old, ancient boundary stone on the edge of the Romanian language, you the gulls have elected on to the governing board of our epics, of our song-grief you turned into Latin and gave to the wind to carry to Rome and there, chiselled into the column, await the Dacian prisoners. You the first whom nostalgia, our dor, ate up in those fields where the dust is sweet. You the first to put your trust like a child in poetry’s spellbinding power and in help from abroad. Sooner the Emperor would have sent experts to you at Tomi, to change the climate, than see you back home, your airy fame back in the purple of his retainers. Who, he has said himself, could be better suited to stand on the shore of the Pontus Euxinus, observing how gradually it becomes the Black Sea, than a poet, a good one, and one of repute—whom shall we send then, whom? And the choice fell on you, Ovid. You were the first to occur to him because you had just begun to be known, appreciated and talked about like a bitter-sweet herb—that was your predicament. Augustus liked your elegies, but only from a distance, where they had the remedial effect the physicians prescribed, an agreeable melancholy, after meals especially, when they repeated on him... The elegies were a medicine prescribed by the physicians to save the Empire. He even said: ‘Why hasn’t that boy sent us anything lately? Force him to work, pinch him a bit, so that he’ll grow sad and Pontic, this wind is troubling me again, I’m gulping air...’ ‘People are asking why you had to relegate him,’ a senator timidly interjected. ‘Suggest to them that he subverted the Empire,’ the Emperor cynically smiled. ‘Morally or materially?’—the exalted servant seemed hard of hearing. ‘What, are you trying to drive me into a quandary? Both, let’s say, a bit of each. Ovid has done immense material and moral harm to Latinity, and the citizens are indignant. Or perhaps,’ he considered, ‘moral would be better, after all we are an Imperium and don’t stint the expenses of a poet, but in moral matters we’re strict: so, he corrupted our youth.’ Next day Augustus had second thoughts: ‘No, for the time being no explanations, for anyone, till we’ve thought of something more plausible’; and, to change the subject, ‘What's Horace doing?’ ‘It's taken   hold of him too, he’s writing no more odes but only epodes, nothing but epodes, an obscure sort of gibberish, what shall we do about Horace, will he too become a case?’ ‘Let him be, let him be. Let’s wait and see how he develops, he may have talent. Maecenas and his house, after all, will take care of the cost and we shall send him the bill with a troop of a hundred men. But as for Ovid, he shall stay for a while yet at Tomi, and no one shall hurt a hair of his head. We shall think it over, mediate, consult the augurs too. No precipitous measures, where poets are concerned.’ Two thousand years have passed, and the Emperor has not hit on appropriate action, he’s thinking still. But you must not give up hope, Ovid, you will be pardoned. The matter was only provisional, an emergency, so be patient, the problem will be resolved, as I said, when circumstances permit. I go again to the sea and converse with Ovid, the poet whose lines of fortune and arteries my earth senses when he raises the Dobruja’s broad hand to his brow.

You who cannot hear or cannot know the terrible intricacies of our species, our minds, the extent to which we have done what we have done,& yet the depth to which we have loved what we have loved — the hillside at dawn, dark eyes outlined with the dark sentences of  kohl, the fūl we shared beneath the lime tree at the general’s house after visiting Goitom in prison for trying to leave the country (the first time), the apricot color of camels racing on the floor of  the world as the fires blazed in celebration of  Independence. How dare I move into the dark space of  your body carrying my dreams, without an invitation, my dreams wandering in ellipses, pet goats or chickens devouring your yard & shirts. Sea, my oblivious afterworld, grant us entry, please, when we knock, but do not keep us there, deliver our flowers & himbasha bread. Though we can’t imagine, now, what our dead might need, & above all can’t imagine it is over & that they are, in fact, askless, are needless, in fact, still hold somewhere the smell of coffee smoking in the house, please, the memory of joy fluttering like a curtain in an open window somewhere inside the brain’s secret luster where a woman, hands red with henna, beats the carpet clean with the stick of a broom & the children, in the distance, choose stones for the competition of stones,& the summer wears a crown of  beles in her green hair & the tigadelti’s white teeth & the beautiful bones of Massawa, the gaping eyes & mouths of its arches worn clean by the sea, your breath & your salt. Please, you, being water too, find a way into the air & then the river & the spring so that your waters can wash the elders, with the medicine of the dreaming of their children, cold & clean.

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect, carries the deepest memory, the information of actions summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep time: so that the longest swell swells least; that is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible, a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind (which is, after all, where these things negotiably are) and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty and communicating hardly any action: go there and rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.

The only reality is the perpetual flow of vital energy. —Montale Spindrift, crustacean patience and a gust of ozone, you come back once more to this dazzling shore, its warm uterine rinse, heart-racing heave and groan. A quick gasp as you slip into the hissing wash, star cluster, dulse and kelp, slick algae, spittle, froth, the intimate slash and dash, hard-packed in the seething broth. Soft water-lip, soft hand, close tug of origin, the sensual writhe and snore of maidenhair and frond, you swim here once more smart as a rogue gene. Spirits of lake, river and woodland pond preside mildly in water never troubled by wind or tide; and the quiet suburban pool is only for the fearful — no wind-wave energies where no sea briar grips and no freak breaker with the violence of the ages comes foaming at the mouth to drown you in its depths. Among pebbles a white conch worn by the suck and crunch, a sandy skull as old as the centuries, in cold and solitude reclines where the moon-magnet shines; but today you swirl and spin in sea water as if, creatures of salt and slime and naked under the sun, life were a waking dream and this the only life.

I have known these estuaries — the channels and canals, the backwaters that flush and eddy to the Pacific, I have skimmed that muddied slurry, felt the nip in the throat where the salt in the air is the salt of the coast, I have tacked where the tide is incomplete: no rollers and breakers, only an ebb that rocks the wayfarers — a rush of silver, the gavel-smack of mullet in the night, mud crabs elbowing denwards under concrete slabs of boat ramps — I have stalked where herons stilt and spear baitfish in green afternoons, cast crab pots in loose analemmas to watch the black sonar spread, tracked prawn trawlers on the broadwater crawling back in the lavender dawn then sat at the jetty’s edge and shucked those tiger shells, cast sucked heads back into the dark, crushed mussel shell underfoot for the burn of sharpened chitin, stepped where stingrays wallow and idle, shuffling their barbs, waiting to strike. I have spent half my life in low tide — nights where I have not known if I am contracting or dragging out again, where the movement of the water is the movement of my mind — unending comings and goings of sounds and narrows, those entry points to my two continents — and my history is the history of currents: a canal small enough to catch a childhood in its net, water vast enough to divide a life.