1. The Sea! The Sea!
Something stalked me, lunged for me out of the sea,
plunged me down to terror at five years old,
struck me rigid with fear from deep in the beast
seething there just past that scorch of sand.
Mommy smiling—The sea! The sea!—and brother
running toward that stumbling, rolling hunger,
laughing;
fathers, children yelling with glee….
But something raged, madder, stronger than all
the games, the grins, the hugs, or home, or love.
At seven years, I suddenly lost that fear,
and the sea was merely the beach, and the biting sand
merely the stuff of shoveled tunnels, towers…
I wondered sometimes what had charmed away
that beast in the surge, leaving merely the waves,
merely the waters’ breath, the glittering dance
of sun on the sea’s palm, the laughing friends—
and ah! the birds, the gulls, their brave play
shaping the air, calling: Here! Higher!
I barely recalled:
something below that lay there dark, dark—
perhaps the sheer staggering, breathing abyss,
or was it a shudder of power broke to my brain
out of the raw depths, lunged and crashed
on the undefending seething sand?
So large,
so large—that breath from the world’s abysmal well—
its wisdom drowned me in terror.
Perhaps depth,
depth alone—not that shattering surf
or the roar, the hiss—but the breathing night below,
felled me.
Decades later, I found that sea
and found it was myself.
How could I know
that all my country’s wind and stone are just
a contrivance of sea-wrack, tide assembled,
lifting, shaping that island that I call me,
that we call us, so that his little life,
this floating island, seems indeed a world.
2. This Floating Island
This floating island seems a world—so loud
with grim play, with business, with distraction,
with seawalls bending against the sea, with plans,
with goals, appointments, deadlines, and with death—
this floating island holds us like a world.
But sometimes we slip down some tide-worn gap
in the nettled slopes that hem the shores, or tumble
past the firm well-ropes, past our plans,
below this island’s times and suns and walls—
then nothing holds us, nothing like a world,
only the vast brooding of that sea.
Immense those powers heaving below the surge
that sweeps us into a chamber of dreams a-swirl
with visions, gestures, hints—
a childhood face
long banished out of the cruel sun, a smile
that tilts the whole swollen sea with grief,
lovers touched and lost, forgotten laughter,
a glance, a voice—
they fill that frail chamber
hung like a scented fruit from the boughs of the sea.
And beyond the slow swells, the tide’s breath,
unfathomed choirs call from afar, chanting:
We are the song that sings you deeper still;
deep as our plunging, glimmering track.
We sound
—through ebb, through glittering flood, through flesh and fall,
through gulfs you will all descend and all transcend—
your limpid passage.
Sighing, the surf wheels,
lifts us, heaves us back to the reeling shore,
then seethes down and gone.
We stumble up-land
cupping a star, a spark, the ghost of a spark,
a glint of water to wet the waiting roots
among these walls and days, among these plans,
this desperate haste bending against the sun,
these goals, appointments, deadlines, and this death
that holds our floating island like a world.
​