Closed for the Season

Now the wind and the weather and the whether come down
down from the hills, down from the down. Lift me up on the rocking roses
all rock-roses, 

false supposes;

lift me up

and carry me out to see the sea. 

The bank has crumbled, the cliff’s edge edges

air where the sea steps used to be; a moon’s bite out of the asphalt shows

the etiquette of gods at tea 

isn’t what it used to be. 

Lift me up

and carry me out to see the sea.

This year a dead zone out at sea: bronze fields like hammered shields

and each dint pried by the sea-sun yields

algae red as spattered blood

algae read as battered mud.

Lift me up

and carry me out to see the sea.

There was a restaurant in a little house, with surfboards dangling up above:

chowder and beer and cheese on toast, a waitress bronzed as this year’s sea

from years of summer waitressing,

years of wading in the surf,

years of surfing in the rain;

she used to admire 

the doting lovers we used to be.

Old now, we stop. The windows are boarded over;

the clay toppled down to the golden sea,

the steps fallen down all the way to the beach,

the roses tumbled out of reach.

Closed for the season. Leave off asking

Reasons for this or that or each

And carry me out to see the sea.

Notation

The mist that slips away 
like the skin of an overripe peach
as the sun reaches 
over the ridge 
and lays hold of the beach;
the laboring cry of the gulls 
pumping daylight up from the sea;
each footstep filled with luminous water, leaving behind 
a wandering trail of notes on the staff lines of the tide.

The Sea Creatures, Crowding Pinkly

At the end of the sea – where the white curls stiffen,

far away from toast or jam –

are the sea creatures crowding, pinkly.

At the end of the sea, and the end of the sky,

their humid lungs are heaving; the wheeze

and spume of their vasty breath

makes a fume shot with scarlet twinkling.

At the end of the sea, where the drawer of the world

snicks shut, and the water quivers –

there the emotional sea creatures crowd,

and the anxious anemone shivers.

See Niya Christine's story painting, Emotional Sea Creatures.

Corpse, Crows, Gull and Vulture

Early morning: a crescent moon high in the pale blue sky, with Jupiter trotting happily behind his shoulder. Some of the beach in the clear, some still in dense fog.

The weather cleared yesterday, and we had one of those rare, early-fall days here: there's no sense of loss or decay on this coast, with the onset of winter, for the simple reason that nothing is preparing to die. Winter here is nothing worse than a long cold shower. So when the light goes golden, and the spray from the surf is hanging in the air, lit up with the setting sun, you get the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” without death behind it: you could believe that war has vanished from the world, and that no parent and child will ever be parted. The pelicans framed their antediluvian profiles, black against the gold, slowly flapping their ancient wings, with their pterodactyl heads drawn well back, and the quadrilaterals of their wings shifting from diamond-shapes to Tennessee outlines and back again: each with its neck proudly bared to the knife.

In the Middle Ages it was thought that pelicans tore open their breasts to make themselves bleed, and fed their young with their blood: hence the pelican was an image of Christ. There is something about the deliberate motions of the bird that makes this plausible: it does not seem quite of this world.

We paused on grassy bluff, where we could look back at the cliff above which our condo is perched, and the little beach at its foot. The corpse of something was there on the beach – a large fish? – a small seal? – and a couple beach-crows were at it, dodging the surf from time to time. A seagull watched them, perched on a rock a couple of yards away, but never disputed the corpse with them. As we watched, a turkey vulture came slowly, slowly down, in great circles, till he was skimming the little beach and practically brushing the rock walls with his huge wings. Eventually he settled on the gull's rock, a little farther back, and observed the crows at their work. He was remarkably small, with his wings folded: not really much bigger than the gull. We expected him to drive off the crows, but he just watched, for a long time. Eventually he stepped down, going carefully behind the gull, and sidled up to the grey lump, whatever it was, that occupied the crows. He never pecked at it, or interfered with the crows: all three of the bird-kinds resolutely ignored each other. He just looked it over, a long, patient contemplation, while the crows darted in and out. He did not seem to like the surf much, and retreated from it a couple of times. And then he took to the air, unfolding again into a huge, magnificent bird, and rose in circles, as slow as he'd come down. He circled a while and then vanished. The gull never moved.

We went on our way: when we came back that way, an hour or two later, the tide was was slightly higher, and everything was gone: corpse, crows, gull and vulture. Not a sign of any of them.

The numen seems to be coming back into the world. I am still at a sad loss to know what exactly I'm doing here; I've run far past the end of my marching orders, but the emptiness that distressed me yesterday has passed. We're going home today, and I'm glad of it: I have massages and painting to do. But it's clear as the morning that I must do some hard thinking, over the next few days.

Leaving the Sea

The waves are gray, running in, and the sky

is gray too. Light rises from water and wind,

obliquely. The tide is past the flood.

I'm still grateful, but I'm puzzled.

Why was I sent here, with an empty envelope

to deliver to a bad address?

There won't be many more,

and a grand love now would only ruin me:

I am leaving the sea.

Now the spine of my life

must be the making of small

and intricate things; the replacement

of a rotting window-sill

with good sound wood;

the call of a thrush

from the red sunrise.

The foam slides in long, ghost-white garlands

down wet obsidian slopes, whispering

of promises long unkept. When I woke this morning

the light of your eyes was fading from mine:

my arms were empty.

Salt Water

My sentence is not to go down to the sea,
which is only for pure of heart;
I wander where the asphalt is bitten away
by winter rains on the clifftop.

The moon is a mottled pearl afloat
in wash of milk: the long fluttering manes
of the white horses wade ashore
in wavering skirmish lines. An endless assault.

The generals fall off
the horsebacks and disappear -- it's only water,
after all. The seals' haul-out is empty,
and no whales swim.

I count them off on my fingers, each wave,
but the total never comes out right. I think
they must be right, that I embezzled
the salt water entrusted to me:

but what I spent it on
I could not tell you now.

Tell Me

Tell me
stories about the last time
you wore your shirt inside out and

tell me again
that there was never an interregnum
never

a time when the lights went out;
that even then, the whales pulled
their oars in deep places

tell me the wind
drops in little bays even
where the headlands lean out
over the fretting sea.

Horse and Horseman

Last night the sun
dropped into the ocean without a splash,
and the water went black, went underground,
the line of the sky a faint orange
where it met the intractable dark.

So tell me, when the moon rose,
and the shadows slowly
redrew themselves on the walls,
where were you walking? Your quick bright form
appears, and disappears. The dead outnumber the living.
They always have, and we knew that, but
only gradually have we learned to know it
by the emptiness of hands that once held clay,
by the missing step in a staircase:
we the living are only froth,
riding on waves of the dead.

---

You misunderstand. I do not feel betrayed.
No one has wronged me. But to make this crossing
I must chose horse and horseman carefully.

---

I don't know this whale, gliding
off the point of Devil's Punchbowl.
He's long and pale, no Gray, and
he keeps his flukes to himself.
In diving, he shows his endless back, that's all.
Not a show-off. The flukes remain submerged,
and he pushes with them mightily.
You can see the hill of water that they raise
as he makes for deep water.
Like that. A horse like that. That's what I need.

---

For horseman? I need a boy
with long yellow hair, and a sullen look.
He must be outrageously lucky:
you must take these things on the volley,
if they're to be taken at all.

---

Now rap rap rap! Like a woodpecker
Against a steel chimney. Horse and rider,
Boy and whale, sky and sea:
Now we'll see something worth seeing.

Monday

the spray of nothing knowing
nothing owing nothing lost
and pulling us the spinnaker of God

Lost at Sea

On bad days I think we are swimmers
in the wide sea: clutching, pulling under,
each thinking to find a life raft in another.

On good days I think the same, only
I'm not so sure we know what's underneath.

I remember taking a deep breath of the water --
all rippling shadows, the lungs filling
with dark green light, my mouth full of something
stronger, deeper, older than air.

At first I thought the diamondback pattern
was a trick of subaqueous light along my skin.

But my lengthening tail, unrolling in the push and pull,
glittered just the same, each flickering scale
winking at the next, and we twined as we sank
in the slowly burning jewelry of our flesh.

Don't wait up for us. We're not coming back.

My lover comes home tonight from far away
from fogs where sunlight glints on gray
from the thump and purl of insisting waves.

She won't still love me the voices say
the shrouded moon will have drawn her to play
with men far older and younger, who pray

sweetly in her own tongue, who pay
extravagant compliments and array
her in opals and pearls and jade.

My lover comes home tonight from far away;
She won't still love me the voices say.