It must be peaceful to come to the end
of the writing, or need for writing, poems,
to wholly let go, like a cat on a lap
heavy and boneless as unbaked bread dough,
of that constant attentiveness to the sea,
all weathers and tides, its bland seething.
Alert as if no others watched,
as if there had never been another
watcher, driven to know precisely
what is being uncovered or covered
if its near, sluggish graceless barings
show glint, slither, in the old weeds,
or afar, if from under the dark spread
with its tiny wavery quilting, there erupts
something that ducks down under again.
And, if envisioned, the ecstatic strain
and suspense of a try at validation
of mollusc, redworm, mermaid, monster,
something unseen because not looked at
or so brilliantly seen it died into fable,
something nobody knew for sure
was there, and nobody needed to know!
And unending doubt! Could one bring it back
(on the leader of a glimpse so slight,
handling the deep play so unsurely)
to the world, to its own true tremble of light?
It must be like just before a vacation,
the supper a careless improvising,
a soupkettle crammed with disparate leftovers,
everything kept, even dregs of wine,
bubbling together, the pot unwatched.
Those remnants of past, so much still good,
swell the soup with garbled excitement.
But when the chaos spits something up
which goes over the side and lands on the stove-
the spraddled fern of celery top,
bloodclot of an over-ripe tomato,
tough twig of splurged-on country ham slice-
the pure accident of its splat
is wiped quickly, guiltlessly away,
being nothing more meaningful than that.
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