What word in the deep mind swimming, goldfish word
Or arrow of eel, or sharkblunt, or what sailword
Seine from the blood to feed this dream to stature?
Words for the common blood-and-daylight hungers:
Woolen, iodine, bread.
But what for surf and the fascinate hours
On ecru wharves, in rain:
Beams that reel with the sea and shear the foam up,
Dizzy but decade-deep in the spinning sand, the algae,
Rain fine as meal on the cheek, and a tossed horizon
Scrawled with the smoke of voyage there, for almost hours
unmoving.
This in the swaying days of every season,
Till late, compelled reluctant,
I left with backward eye and absent answer,
To hear through broken night the kelp in a vast sea slapping.
What word for this dare-all that studies the one law: falling; Falling
forever on forward, utter and done,
Throwing its brightness and power, all its wonder away,
Its endeavor away:
The acropolis hung for a trifle of time
Precise in the sun.
Happy who die in love, in fire at midnight
In a shore hotel, or in roadster’s crash made meteor,
All whom lightning shatters or who in planes fall,
Who see the whole globe sailing to embrace them.
Happier they whom love’s atlantic
Hurtles on the dangerous air,
Careless momentum: life a single wave
And death a music in the ultimate sedge.
Around us all, the ocean. What are we?
Pale men irresolute. To most in youth
Comes love, the windy midnight and great stars,
Oaks blowing, friends forgotten, parents’ word
Forgotten. Two alone:
The blood’s confusion sweeter than mind’s clarity.
That moment youth is half the sea—
The rise, the clear and terrible-quick. But not
The giving-over of all, the down
Ward crash or eagle-steep
The onward ruin of the glint descent
Spontaneous. Not the deathward
Drag of excited ocean flung by love,
The giving of self away.
Only the flat collapse, this undiscerned:
Sea’s weight is in the falling wave alone.
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