To Gerald Enscoe
I stood above the sown and generous sea
Late in the day, to muse about your words:
Your human images come to pray for hands
To wipe their vision clear, your human voice
Flinging the poem forward into sound.
Below me, roaring elegies to birds,
Intricate, gray, the waters crawled the sands,
Heaving and groaning, casting up a tree,
A shell, a can to clamber over the ground:
Slow celebration, cluttering ripple on wave.
The waters of that sound blew gray and white
And meaningless to me who had a mind;
And so to you, who had a word to say.
I wondered when the complicated sea
Would tear and tangle in itself and die,
Sheer outrage hammering itself to death
Or loud delight deafening its own delight.
And so I might have mourned the empty sky
Where gluttonous scavengers barked in the rain
A hundred gulls descending to the froth,
Their bodies clumped together, lost to me.
Counting those images, I meant to say
A hundred gulls decline to nothingness;
But, high in cloud, a single naked gull
Shadows a depth in heaven for the eye.
And, for the ear, under the wail and snarl
Of groping foghorns and the winds grown old,
A single human word for love of air
Gathers the tangled discords up to song.
A poem grows with melody and sight:
The foghorn startling the gull blown white
Across the gray, the complicated sea;
And suddenly the sea itself may grow
Simple as once it was, a while ago,
Before it raged at someone lost to me.
A moment, when the gull attempts the air,
Before the horn shudders the feathers off,
The vision and the melody may join.
A hundred birds are nothing to you then,
Nothing a scream; the careful touch of love
Summons the two together for desire:
The cry, the vision of the angry bird
Molded into one cautious human word.
That laden word is rarest of the rare.
It thrives on hunger, and it rises strong
To live above the blindness and the noise
Only as long as bones are neat and spare,
The spine exactly set, the muscles lean.
Before you let a single word escape,
Starve it to leanness; lash it to the shape
Of something skimming on the sea alone
Drive it to sing the clear and measured voice,
I tell you. Even here, too many wings
Blot out the sky; and when the bobwhite sing
(Shyest and sweetest of midwestern birds)
He whispers, hidden in the dusky mist.
So through my cold lucidity of heart
I thought to send you careful rules of song.
But gulls ensnare me here; the sun fades; thought
By thought the tide heaves, bobbing my words’ damp wings;
Mind is the moon-wave roiling on ripples now.
Sun on the bone-hulled galleons of those gulls
Charms my immense irrelevance away,
And lures wings moonward. Openly she soars,
A miracle out of all gray sounds, the moon,
Deepening and rifting swell and formal sky.
Woman or bird, she plumes the ashening sound,
Flaunting to nothingness the rules I made.
Scattering cinders, widening, over the sand
Her cold epistle falls. To plumb the fall
Of silver on ripple, evening ripple on wave,
Quick celebration where she lives for light,
I let all measures die. My voice is gone,
My words to you unfinished, where they lie
Common and bare as stone in diamond veins.
Where the sea moves the word moves, where the sea
Subsides, the vague word fades with moony tides,
And beer cans drift beyond the hands of friends.
Now still alive, my skeletal words gone bare,
Lapsing like dead gulls’ brittle bones and drowned
Dance without meaning, under darkened air
The dithyrambic gestures of the moon,
Sun-lost, the mind plumed, Dionysian,
I send you shoreward echoes of my voice:
A blue sea-poem, joy, moon-ripple on wave.
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