178 Ocean poems

After a night of wind we are surprised by the light, how it flutters up from the back of the sea and leaves us at ease. We can walk along the shore this way or that, all day. Sit in the spiky grass among the low whittled bushes, listening to crickets, to the whisk of the small waves, the rattling back of stones. “Observation,” our Golden Nature Guide instructs, is the key to science. Look all around you. Some beaches may be quite barren except for things washed up.” A buoy and a blue bottle, a lightbulb cloudy but unbroken. For an hour my daughter gathers trinkets, bits of good luck. She sings the song she’s just invented: Everybody knows when the old days come. Although it is October, today falls into the shape of summer, that sense of languid promise in which we are offered another and then another spell of flawless weather. It is the weather of Sundays, the weather of memory, and I can see myself sitting on a porch looking out at water, the discreet shores of a lake. Three or four white pines were enough of a mystery, how they shook and whispered, how at night I felt them leaning against my window, like the beginning of a story in which children must walk deeper and deeper into a dark forest, and are afraid, yet calm, unaware of the arrangements made for them to survive. My daughter counts her shells and stones, my wife clips bayberry from the pathway. I raise an old pair of binoculars, follow the edge of the sky to the lighthouse, then down into the waves as they fold around rocks humped up out of the sea. I can turn the wheel and blur it all into a dazzle, the pure slips and shards of light. “A steady push of wind,” we read in the book, “gives water its rolling, rising and falling motion. As the sea moves up and down, the wave itself moves forward. As it nears the shore friction from the bottom causes it to rise higher until it tips forward in an arc and breaks.” On the table in front of the house is the day’s collection: sea-glass and starfish, a pink claw, that blue bottle— some to be taken home, arranged in a box, laid on a shelf, later rediscovered, later thrown away, casually, without regret, and some of it, even now, to be discarded, like the lesser stones, and the pale chipped shells which are so alike we can agree that saving one or two will be enough.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances. They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds. They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets. The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

An inland sea – blue as a sapphire – set Within a sparkling, emerald mountain chain Where day and night fir-needles sift like rain Thro’ the voluptuous air. The soft winds fret The waves, and beat them wantonly to foam. The golden distances across the sea Are shot with rose and purple. Languorously The silver seabirds in wide circles roam. The sun drops slowly down the flaming West And flings its rays across to set aglow The islands rocking on the cool waves’ crest And the great glistening domes of snow on snow. And thro’ the mist the Olympics flash and float Like opals linked around a beating throat.

Over the sea our galleys went, With cleaving prows in order brave, To a speeding wind and a bounding wave, A gallant armament: Each bark built out of a forest-tree, Left leafy and rough as first it grew, And nailed all over the gaping sides, Within and without, with black bull-hides, Seethed in fat and suppled in flame, To bear the playful billows' game: So, each good ship was rude to see, Rude and bare to the outward view, But each upbore a stately tent Where cedar-pales in scented row Kept out the flakes of the dancing brine, And an awning drooped the mast below, In fold on fold of the purple fine, That neither noontide nor star-shine Nor moonlight cold which maketh mad, Might pierce the regal tenement. When the sun dawned, oh, gay and glad We set the sail and plied the oar; But when the night-wind blew like breath, For joy of one day's voyage more, We sang together on the wide sea, Like men at peace on a peaceful shore; Each sail was loosed to the wind so free, Each helm made sure by the twilight star, And in a sleep as calm as death, We, the voyagers from afar, Lay stretched along, each weary crew In a circle round its wondrous tent Whence gleamed soft light and curled rich scent, And with light and perfume, music too: So the stars wheeled round, and the darkness past, And at morn we started beside the mast, And still each ship was sailing fast! Now, one morn, land appeared!—a speck Dim trembling betwixt sea and sky: "Avoid it," cried our pilot, "check The shout, restrain the eager eye!" But the heaving sea was black behind For many a night and many a day, And land, though but a rock, drew nigh; So, we broke the cedar pales away, Let the purple awning flap in the wind, And a statue bright was on every deck! We shouted, every man of us, And steered right into the harbour thus, With pomp and paean glorious. A hundred shapes of lucid stone! All day we built its shrine for each, A shrine of rock for every one, Nor paused we till in the westering sun We sat together on the beach To sing because our task was done. When lo! what shouts and merry songs! What laughter all the distance stirs! A loaded raft with happy throngs Of gentle islanders! "Our isles are just at hand," they cried, "Like cloudlets faint in even sleeping; Our temple-gates are opened wide, Our olive-groves thick shade are keeping For these majestic forms"—they cried. Oh, then we awoke with sudden start From our deep dream, and knew, too late, How bare the rock, how desolate, Which had received our precious freight: Yet we called out—"Depart! Our gifts, once given, must here abide. Our work is done; we have no heart To mar our work,"—we cried.

“Messieurs, l’huitre étoit bonne. Adieu. Vivez en paix.” —Boileau Secret they are, sealed, annealed, and brainless And solitary as Dickens said, but They have something to say: that there is more Than one way to yield. The first—and the hardest. The most nearly hindered—is when you pull Them off the rocks, a stinking, sawing sedge Sucking them back under the black mud, full Of hermit crabs and their borrowed snailshells, Minnows scattering like superstitions, The surf dragging, and every power Life permits them holding out, holding on For dear life. Sometimes the stones give way first. Before they will, but still we gather them, Even if our hands are bloody as meat, For a lunch Queen Victoria preferred: “A barrel of Wellfleet oysters, points down” Could last across the ocean, all the way To Windsor, wakening a widow’s taste. We ate them this afternoon, out of their Armor that was formidably grooved, though It proved our own reversal wiser still: Keep the bones and stones inside, or never Leave the sea. “He was a brave man,” Swift said, “Who first eat one.” Even now, precedent Of centuries is not always enough. Driving the knife into muscles that mould The valves so close to being impartial. Surrender, when it comes—and it must come: Lavish after that first grudging release Back there in the sea, the giving over Of despair, this time—makes me speculate. Like Oscar and oysters, I feel “always Slightly immortal when in the sea”: what Happens now we are out? Is the risk worth While for a potential pearl? No, what we’re Really after is the moment of release, The turn and tear of the blade that tightens, Tortures, ultimately tells. When you spread The shells, something always sticks to the wrong One, and a few drops of liquor dribble Into the sand. Scrape it off: in the full Half, as well as a Fautrier, a Zen Garden, and the smell of herring brine that Ferenczi said we remember from the womb, Lunch is served, in shiny stoneware sockets, Blue milk in the sea’s filthiest cup. More Easily an emblem for the inner man Than dinner, sundered, for the stomach. We Take them queasily, wonder as we gulp When it is—then, now, tomorrow—they’re dead.

There were no road rails. I remember no road rails and the death depth off the cliffs we motored along. I remember speed in a parched Chevy clunker that could not have sped, and bench seats, and no buckles, and bare thighs peeling off faux leather at every hairpin. Every elevated canyon mile was a feat but a breath of less slickened air too, less cog and fume — a winding away from the wavering, sea-leg steam off blinding sidewalks, infinite sidewalks and other shoeless kids kicking rusted palm leaves outside infinite apartment complexes. Away from our corner of the valley of concrete corners, of no evidence of valley besides boulders stacked in the distance of every vista. The driver was a stranger, was my mother after my whole life had passed with stranger after stranger, was my mother after seven years, and me at seven years with her driving that snuff-colored Nova from her blinding valley not a valley — through Laurel, Topanga, Malibu canyons all the way to some fantastic, to her beloved blue — eucalyptus choking local growth the whole trek. And the cooling air as we 
efforted west, and the jolt of a castle,The Castle, in a distant crook of a range that hid the slate of the ocean, made me want to stop moving but not stop here. I remember hoping to find hermit crabs the size of the mole on my right side chin. And if I tethered them to a stick they’d line up by mass and trade shells, find homes that fit. And there’d be one left without, one torn out. A book said a scientist leaned into wet sand, watched a torn crab die in the beak of a gull. I can’t remember if I saw that death or read it. 
I remember watching a wrong castle tucked into a wrong mountain notch on the chin of the sky, like the hermit mole on my chin if my face were the sky. “It’s a beauty mark,” my mother had said, “Don’t pick at it.” I eyed that smoking stranger at the wheel and dug my nail in as the Pacific swelled into view that first time.

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night, lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us. The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars. Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time our love like a knife between us defining the boundaries that we can never cross nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream, cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths and the dark wound closed in behind us. Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made, gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward, the rooms where we had come together bombd. But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now, you pass with ease into the destructive world. There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails, falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore and within the indestructible night I am alone.

Wild, wild the storm, and the sea high running, Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering, Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering, On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting, Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing, (That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?) Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending, Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting, Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs careering, A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night confronting, That savage trinity warily watching.

After she left the first thing Ahmad Jamal played was a bridge: he fingered water falling over a cantilever & made a dark blue truth transparent. I try to suspend belief across a span of hand- written notes. At noon, I cross myself over a painted bridge in Pittsburgh, sauntering from Station Square to Smithfield St haunted by a smell along the Monongahela. These streets cobble stone memories, work overtime in my olfactories. Once, my piano-playing girlfriend fingered daisies waving in a breeze. Then in love with her Noes I began sniffing everything. But the florid truth is that I gave her a ring of rust on her windowsill. A heart broken like a line in a poem. My girl left me, & Ahmad Jamal was playing “Wave” on my iPod. It’s probably not smart to admit this, but what he didn’t play came across loudest. I only saw her hands say goodbye because of the beauty in my earbuds. Then I nosed a wine- bottle blue scarf she’d left on the right arm of a chair. Be honest, would you have sniffed it? What song doesn’t long for the long fingers of a pianist? A cantilever here only holds up meaning. I smelled farewell in a coffee shop as she high-heeled east. Sunlight buttered loafing pedestrians, shadowed crossing things as I wondered whether Jamal’s main fault was living too long and weathering, if his main technique was to cleave themes or to refrain. As he plays, the heart gives out a rapid repeat. A piano bench pines to be dusted with notes, can it buckle up such wont? Maybe there are facets of bridges one will always truss, something phonic and unforgettable about how they allow us to cross. A wave of daisies in a vase — how they ravel aromatic in the mind. Ahmad Jamal waving across the room: me damned, & roiling underneath like a river. Maybe I dreamt this. But when I licked my fingertips to turn the page, they became daisies pushing between bricks on a twilit bridge.

O Carib Isle! The tarantula rattling at the lily’s foot Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand Near the coral beach—nor zigzag fiddle crabs Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert And anagrammatize your name)—No, nothing here Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts In wrinkled shadows—mourns. And yet suppose I count these nacreous frames of tropic death, Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave Squared off so carefully. Then To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names Deliberate, gainsay death’s brittle crypt. Meanwhile The wind that knots itself in one great death— Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath. But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush? What man, or What Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses? His Carib mathematics web the eyes’ baked lenses! Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost Sieved upward, white and black along the air Until it meets the blue’s comedian host. Let not the pilgrim see himself again For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes; —Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain! And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again! Slagged of the hurricane—I, cast within its flow, Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant. You have given me the shell, Satan,—carbonic amulet Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.