Wet shells in my wool pockets,
A feeling of walking as if on America
Among stones of different homelands,
The speckled, the veined, the spotted,
Agate and opaque gray-green regimes,
The rusty drip of a slow iron spring,
The stranding of oysters’ empty compartments,
Ruffled chassis still hinged,
Castle among shells;
This morning the blue inlet shines in fog
Unbroken by horizon,
Only the noiseless dives of black and white buffleheads,
No splash as they surface,
The limp long neck of a dead grebe,
Each khaki foot like a spray of buckeye leaves,
Its skewery beak, clamped on a kelp strand,
Pointing toward one boat going out;
The bird has no eye
And a gull, probably, has pecked right through the
breastbone.
To the heart;
When I am here, I understand even my own writings,
Those small things among all dwarfed human things.
Somewhere in this wild neighborhood your prison
Locks its fifteen hundred men
Away from curiosity.
If only you could laugh at the ridiculous head-shaking
Of the sea worm
Or wonder that the heron chooses to be lonely,
A still tide-measurer.
Of course I am afraid to correspond with you,
To ask an honest question,
Even to praise my daughter,
Or display the outsider’s perpetual acquitting craziness
of passion.
I think of the deer close beyond your wall,
How they roam beneath safe gunbarrels in the towers.
What if only Iam writing you?
Then it’s too much responsibility
To write you the great beauty
The moonless tide book is dried from;
To translate the wit of puffins
Diving deep as octopi for trollers’ bait;
And demonstrate how common
I am in the droves from which you’ve picked one name.
Returned to this opening sea-land
All my wrong-headed tension bolts right and free,
All clumsiness and backache and obsession,
Just by standing a moment on a changing shore,
Widening and narrowing,
Beside a chiton cast up
And a stone shanghaied out for a voyage
In exchange.
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