178 Ocean poems

The wind blew high, the waters raved, A ship drove on the land, A hundred human creatures saved Kneel’d down upon the sand. Three-score were drown’d, three-score were thrown Upon the black rocks wild, And thus among them, left alone, They found one helpless child. A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred, Stood out from all the rest, And gently laid the lonely head Upon his honest breast. And travelling o’er the desert wide It was a solemn joy, To see them, ever side by side, The sailor and the boy. In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst, The two were still but one, Until the strong man droop’d the first And felt his labours done. Then to a trusty friend he spake, “Across the desert wide, O take this poor boy for my sake!” And kiss’d the child and died. Toiling along in weary plight Through heavy jungle, mire, These two came later every night To warm them at the fire. Until the captain said one day, “O seaman good and kind, To save thyself now come away, And leave the boy behind!” The child was slumbering near the blaze: “O captain, let him rest Until it sinks, when God’s own ways Shall teach us what is best!” They watch’d the whiten’d ashy heap, They touch’d the child in vain; They did not leave him there asleep, He never woke again.

The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her. The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks  the surface—human, maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp. A wild life. This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber— as if I know what prayer means. I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer. Who. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned. Who. I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue.Can you see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself: to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.

1 Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight. Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else move but the cold sea rippling like galvanize and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof, till a wind start to interfere with the trees. I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard as I went downhill, and I nearly said: “Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,” but the bitch look through me like I was dead. A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on. The driver size up my bags with a grin: “This time, Shabine, like you really gone!” I ain’t answer the ass, I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings. But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival— I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation, But Maria Concepcion was all my thought watching the sea heaving up and down as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun signing her name with every reflection; I knew when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea, sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back, so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied and the Flight swing seaward: “Is no use repeating that the sea have more fish. I ain’t want her dressed in the sexless light of a seraph, I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and till the day when I can lean back and laugh, those claws that tickled my back on sweating Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand.” As I worked, watching the rotting waves come past the bow that scissor the sea like silk, I swear to you all, by my mother’s milk, by the stars that shall fly from tonight’s furnace, that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home; I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. But let me tell you how this business begin. 2 Raptures of the Deep Smuggled Scotch for O’Hara, big government man, between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn’t touch us, and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway, but a voice kept saying: “Shabine, see this business of playing pirate?” Well, so said, so done! That whole racket crash. And I for a woman, for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion. Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Inquiry was being organized to conduct a big quiz, with himself as chairman investigating himself. Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be, not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish, khaki-pants red niggers like you and me. What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion, plates flying and thing, so I swear: “Not again!” It was mashing up my house and my family. I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain; all the silver I had was the coins on the sea. You saw them ministers in The Express, guardians of the poor—one hand at their back, and one set o’ police only guarding their house, and the Scotch pouring in through the back door. As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze, that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth, that I said: “Shabine, this is shit, understand!” But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand, couldn’t get off his high horse and kick me himself. I have seen things that would make a slave sick in this Trinidad, the Limers’ Republic. I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head, the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion, so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick, name O’Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head; but this Caribbean so choke with the dead that when I would melt in emerald water, whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent, I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans, dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men. I saw that the powdery sand was their bones ground white from Senegal to San Salvador, so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month in the Seamen’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons. When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife, when I saw my worries with that other woman, I wept under water, salt seeking salt, for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep to float her again. When we drank, the limey got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion. He said he was getting the bends. Good for him! The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion, the hurt I had done to my wife and children, was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light where I could rest, like the pelicans know, so I got raptures once, and I saw God like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far voice was rumbling, “Shabine, if you leave her, if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star.” When I left the madhouse I tried other women but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts bristled like sea eggs and I couldn’t dive. The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind. Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor? Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life? 3 Shabine Leaves the Republic I had no nation now but the imagination. After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me when the power swing to their side. The first chain my hands and apologize, “History”; the next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride. Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks— a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade, the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs that pass before you finish bawling “Parade!”? I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me, a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat. I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine! They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma, your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat. A spit like that worth any number of words. But that’s all them bastards have left us: words. I no longer believed in the revolution. I was losing faith in the love of my woman. I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok crystallize in The Twelve. Was between the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags using shirts, their chests waiting for holes. They kept marching into the mountains, and their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand. They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street, and the echo of power at the end of the street. Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate; the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine, on Frederick Street the idlers all marching by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf. In the 12:30 movies the projectors best not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc- olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West- ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef. 4 The Flight,Passing Blanchisseuse Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse. Gulls wheel like. from a gun again, and foam gone amber that was white, lighthouse and star start making friends, down every beach the long day ends, and there, on that last stretch of sand, on a beach bare of all but light, dark hands start pulling in the seine of the dark sea, deep, deep inland. 5 Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn, brewing li’l coffee; fog coil from the sea like the kettle steaming when I put it down slow, slow, ’cause I couldn’t believe what I see: where the horizon was one silver haze, the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull, it was horrors, but it was beautiful. We float through a rustling forest of ships with sails dry like paper, behind the glass I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons, and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun, right through their tissue, you traced their bones like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines, the backward-moving current swept them on, and high on their decks I saw great admirals, Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders they gave those Shabines, and that forest of masts sail right through the Flight, and all you could hear was the ghostly sound of waves rustling like grass in a low wind and the hissing weeds they trailed from the stern; slowly they heaved past from east to west like this round world was some cranked water wheel, every ship pouring like a wooden bucket dredged from the deep; my memory revolve on all sailors before me, then the sun heat the horizon’s ring and they was mist. Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name? Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados. 6 The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas You see them on the low hills of Barbados bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes, trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails; when I was green like them, I used to think those cypresses, leaning against the sea, that take the sea noise up into their branches, are not real cypresses but casuarinas. Now captain just call them Canadian cedars. But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas, whoever called them so had a good cause, watching their bending bodies wail like women after a storm, when some schooner came home with news of one more sailor drowned again. Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind whatever grief bent them was all the same, since they were trees with nothing else in mind but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave; but we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain, to love those trees with an inferior love, and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we, if we live like the names our masters please, by careful mimicry might become men.” 7 The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor When the stars self were young over Castries, I loved you alone and I loved the whole world. What does it matter that our lives are different? Burdened with the loves of our different children? When I think of your young face washed by the wind and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea? The lights are out on La Toc promontory, except for the hospital. Across at Vigie the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own promise, to leave you the one thing I own, you whom I loved first: my poetry. We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone. 8 Fight with the Crew It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark— that was the cook, some Vincentian arse with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark, and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn’t give me a ease, like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book, this same one here, that I was using to write my poetry, so one day this man snatch it from my hand, and start throwing it left and right to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,” and start mincing me like I was some hen because of the poems. Some case is for fist, some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife— this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first, but he keep reading, “O my children, my wife,” and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh; it move like a flying fish, the silver knife that catch him right in the plump of his calf, and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white than he thought he was. I suppose among men you need that sort of thing. It ain’t right but that’s how it is. There wasn’t much pain, just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend, but none of them go fuck with my poetry again. 9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams The jet that was screeching over the Flight was opening a curtain into the past. “Dominica ahead!” “It still have Caribs there.” “One day go be planes only, no more boat.” “Vince, God ain’t make nigger to fly through the air.” “Progress, Shabine, that’s what it’s all about. Progress leaving all we small islands behind.” I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea. ”Progress is something to ask Caribs about. They kill them by millions, some in war, some by forced labor dying in the mines looking for silver, after that niggers; more progress. Until I see definite signs that mankind change, Vince, I ain’t want to hear. Progress is history’s dirty joke. Ask that sad green island getting nearer.” Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine. In such fierce salt let my wound be healed, me, in my freshness as a seafarer. That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire, I ran like a Carib through Dominica, my nose holes choked with memory of smoke; I heard the screams of my burning children, I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi of devil’s parasols under white, leprous rocks; my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests, with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise of the soldiers’ progress through the thick leaves, though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran through the blades of balisier sharper than spears; with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran with moss-footed speed like a painted bird; then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot catch the dry branches and I drowned at last in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white, there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight. I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams. It anchored her sleep, that insomniac’s Bible, a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop’s eye center, from the Dominican Republic. Its coarse pages were black with the usual symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish; an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered like a butcher chart, delivered the future. One night; in a fever, radiantly ill, she say, “Bring me the book, the end has come.” She said: “I dreamt of whales and a storm,” but for that dream, the book had no answer. A next night I dreamed of three old women featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate, and I scream at them to come out my house, and I try beating them away with a broom, but as they go out, so they crawl back again, until I start screaming and crying, my flesh raining with sweat, and she ravage the book for the dream meaning, and there was nothing; my nerves melt like a jellyfish—that was when I broke— they found me round the Savannah, screaming: All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad. Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea; you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared, so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy, but all you ain’t know my strength, hear? The coconuts standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki, they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands, and all you best dread the day I am healed of being a human. All you fate in my hand, ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend, I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, I who have no weapon but poetry and the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield! 10 Out of the Depths Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn. “Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.” The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range with snow on the top. “Ay, Skipper, sky dark!” “This ain’t right for August.” “This light damn strange, this season, sky should be clear as a field.” A stingray steeplechase across the sea, tail whipping water, the high man-o’-wars start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery of flying fish miss us! Vince say: “You notice?” and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck of the Flight and shake it from head to tail. “Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!” “Where Cap’n headin? Like the man gone blind!” “If we’s to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!” “Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!” I have not loved those that I loved enough. Worse than the mule kick of Kick-’Em-Jenny Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between mountains of water. If I was frighten? The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry, “I’m the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams.” I remembered them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom pass fathom, my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing hold me, trembling, how my family safe home. Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said: “I from backward people who still fear God.” Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale, proud with despair, we sang how our race survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril, and now I was ready for whatever death will. But if that storm had strength, was in Cap’n face, beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes, crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus, and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us, and I feeding him white rum, while every crest with Leviathan-lash make the Flight quail like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest, till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm. And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come. 11 After the Storm There’s a fresh light that follows a storm while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion marrying the ocean, then drifting away in the widening lace of her bridal train with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone. I wanted nothing after that day. Across my own face, like the face of the sun, a light rain was falling, with the sea calm. Fall gently, rain, on the sea’s upturned face like a girl showering; make these islands fresh as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace, every hot road, smell like clothes she just press and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream; whatever the rain wash and the sun iron: the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam, is clothes enough for my nakedness. Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied if my hand gave voice to one people’s grief. Open the map. More islands there, man, than peas on a tin plate, all different size, one thousand in the Bahamas alone, from mountains to low scrub with coral keys, and from this bowsprit, I bless every town, the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them, and the one small road winding down them like twine to the roofs below; I have only one theme: The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart— the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know, vain search for one island that heals with its harbor and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow doesn’t injure the sand. There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus, on the other Mars; fall, and are one, just as this earth is one island in archipelagoes of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars. Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

walking up John Street thinking of you I saw a slash of sea between houses and felt — as always, no matter mood, its or mine — as though it was the source of language and language the source of itself

When I woke, the waves had gone black, turning over the macerated curd of the ocean bottom, heaving its sludge onto the beach. Some storm far out, I thought, had ravaged the sea, stirred up its bed, sent the whole mess flying to shore. At my feet I found a grave of starfish, broken and gnarled among the fleshy snipes and heads. Every shade of death covered the sand. It looked hopeless in the pale day but for the birds, a congress of gulls, terns, and the rarest plovers, calm for once, satiated, a measure of the one law: this sea will claim it all— feed them, catch them, grind their complicated bones.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by; And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

That sail which leans on light, tired of islands, a schooner beating up the Caribbean for home, could be Odysseus, home-bound on the Aegean; that father and husband's longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name in every gull's outcry. This brings nobody peace. The ancient war between obsession and responsibility will never finish and has been the same for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore now wriggling on his sandals to walk home, since Troy sighed its last flame, and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough from whose groundswell the great hexameters come to the conclusions of exhausted surf. The classics can console. But not enough.

Crash on crash of the sea, straining to wreck men; sea-boards, continents, raging against the world, furious, stay at last, for against your fury and your mad fight, the line of heroes stands, godlike: Akroneos, Oknolos, Elatreus, helm-of-boat, loosener-of-helm, dweller-by-sea, Nauteus, sea-man, Prumneos, stern-of-ship, Agchilalos, sea-girt, Elatreus, oar-shaft: lover-of-the-sea, lover-of-the-sea-ebb, lover-of-the-swift-sea, Ponteus, Proreus, Oöos: Anabesneos, who breaks to anger as a wave to froth: Amphiolos, one caught between wave-shock and wave-shock: Eurualos, board sea-wrack, like Ares, man’s death, and Naubolidos, best in shape, of all first in size: Phaekous, sea’s thunderbolt— ah, crash on crash of great names— man-tamer, man’s-help, perfect Laodamos: and last the sons of great Alkinöos, Laodamos, Halios, and god-like Clytomeos. Of all nations, of all cities, of all continents, she is favoured above the rest, for she gives men as great as the sea, to battle against the elements and evil: greater even than the sea, they live beyond wrack and death of cities, and each god-like name spoken is as a shrine in a godless place. But to name you, we, reverent, are breathless, weak with pain and old loss, and exile and despair— our hearts break but to speak your name, Oknaleos— and may we but call you in the feverish wrack of our storm-strewn beach, Eretmeos, our hurt is quiet and our hearts tamed, as the sea may yet be tamed, and we vow to float great ships, named for each hero, and oar-blades, cut of mountain-trees as such men might have shaped: Eretmeos, and the sea is swept, baffled by the lordly shape, Akroneos has pines for his ship’s keel; to love, to mate the sea? Ah there is Ponteos, the very deep roar, hailing you dear— they clamour to Ponteos, and to Proëos leap, swift to kiss, to curl, to creep, lover to mistress. What wave, what love, what foam, For Oöos who moves swift as the sea? Ah stay, my heart, the weight of lovers, of loneliness drowns me, alas that their very names so press to break my heart with heart-sick weariness, what would they be, the very gods, rearing their mighty length beside the unharvested sea?

I have hidden inside a sea shell but forgotten in which. Now daily I dive, filtering the sea through my fingers, to find myself. Sometimes I think a giant fish has swallowed me. Looking for it everywhere I want to make sure it will get me completely. The sea-bed attracts me, and I’m repelled by millions of sea shells that all look alike. Help, I am one of them. If only I knew, which. How often I’ve gone straight up to one of them, saying: That’s me. Only, when I prised it open it was empty.

O mer! O mœurs! O merde contemporaine! What’s left of my battles and my turmoil is in my seaside cabin: this roiling air. And yet it’s what’s outside that makes me shiver. Not the ocean coldness — something heavier. Hot black tea might help — it revives. Two kinds of glass are at hand for my thirst: that windowpane, this tumbler for my tea. If  I stare through the faceted clear sides of   the second at the first, I’ll see the darkness squinting back at me. I can’t deny that even though my eye — clairvoyant as a crystal ball — clinks like it can see something, I don’t know what comes next    ... (Zek — zek — whetstones on knives    ... a nickering    ...    Here comes a horse, it whinnies and the rider — Stick him!, thieves shout as they leap down from a tree and stab, then they lead the horse away down the long snowbound shore.) Windswept snow and sand are sorrel: tea leaves scalded by sunset. Sea foam rushes up these shores to decorate some fir trees but not others. And on the withers of a wave a gull-equestrian comes riding in — Haie! Here they both are! Snow explodes like sugar that someone is stabbing with a spoon in a glass of chai. And the tea-air sweetens, the snow-sand dissolves, the light of  it switched off, spent, an omen: now look — from deep within the firmament Time has bobbed up like the moon: the clock face of  a slice of   lemon. I clink the teaspoon in the glass — what’s that about? And even though each hourly radius of   the lemon slice is fixed in the white rind, between these translucencies pressed pulp spills out. Like lime or lemon, the taste of  Time is sour — and yet it has no odor, color, hour. My clinking teaspoon’s yet another of my self-delusions, since it’s only the glass that answers it, and Time says nothing in reply — like all the other governings that invite us to believe they have their power over us. In every object, quick or dead, there’s Time, yet Time itself  is unaware of   Time — the way a gull (such a polyglot of  fish-tongues), soaring in the dark, unknowingly glows at ten to two, her wings the phosphorescent hands of a clock. No people in this region. But — do people exist at all? And the so-called base and superstructure get, at best, a grade of  C (in Russian, “three,” troika — a kind of carriage — in which the Uriah Heeps are riding toward our “bright new future”    ...    ). Oh, plenty of   hearty pink-faced people (gray-faced, too) here    ...    but are they that real? There’s only sea and tides and more of the same. Sea air throws bombast at my cabin and makes it talk. My window’s blinded by a heavy foamy sea-pulp blast. At the bottom of my tea glass — sweetest sweet. But sugar specks are stuck to the sides, scarcely rinsed by waves of tea, whether attacked or not by my spoon. Now come the many stars that the sky is, or was — like the American flag on the moon — but under such a sky, who feels he needs Kant’s categorical imperative? So Time is always empty, a negative, and doesn’t bother us the way this landscape does. I could have sparkled like a Cicero! But even out here all words are turned into a game of  ping-pong, which makes my silenced brain come bubbling out my throat — it’s just one more white foam    ... And only an insatiable gull’s scream of dissent marks this deaf   land not as the island of a castaway but as a massive continent. Translated from the Russian by Reginald Gibbons and the author