ONE

Sad summer of endlessly grieving gulls
Stink of low tide
Seaweed drying in the sun
The horseshoe crabs climbing out of the shallows to die

Summer of reception-rooms
Where old men sit
Awaiting a doctor’s decree
Amid the blare of game-shows and commercials

To age is to become invisible
A ghost, or pair of ghosts
Wispy, rheumatoid,
Constantly risking humiliation -
The heart flees childward
To a field with daffodils

Summer of false teeth, food that’s lost its taste
Each day brings fewer pleasures, joys less sweet
Besides, what could I chew with this old face?
Try vanity, try pride (a man must eat!)

I come to know that I am not alone:
I learn the lamentation of the quail
The mollusk’s silent suffering on a stone
Those fallen petals scattering in the breeze
Beautiful are the death-throes of
The prisoners of the world
And to fail is to believe in fresh beginnings.
But to be stripped bare
Like trees in winter, to be laid low,
Is the necessary condition for the soul to grow
And with the soul the world.

I paddle out past the sandbars
To where the sea-floor darkens with gray stones
Turning the water green-gray and opaque
From out here, half a mile from shore,
The coastline seems to wrap around the earth
Bright shingled cottages dot the bluffs
Above, the azure canopy of sky
Hangs over turquoise water.

I am at home in the elements
Lithe as an eel
Surrounded by the sea, the sultry air,
The wind-blown whimsy of marshmallow clouds
I believe, I belong, in the great chain of being!

An ordered world spreads out before my mind:
To those beneath me - animals and plants -
Life-giving gods, I offer thanks and praise
And sacrifice myself to those above:
We are the bread of angels and we die
So they may live - it is our works, both good
And beautiful that are their heavenly food.

The universe is an immortal conch
Ingenious, self-engendering, pure desire
Both question and answer to the abyss
Of nothingness, emerging in a gyre.

And I’m not just a fragment but the whole
A microcosm with a cosmic role
A moral space is born because we love
So says the troubadour, so sings the dove.

And the least flower lost among the weeds
Is a perfection, knows just what it needs
But like the ancient fish, like me, like you,
Is drawn beyond its present state
To die so that the world may live anew.

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TWO

1

Light blossomed
Within me
Again

A-rocking I went
Faceless
Among somewheres

My mother the sea!
The tides, the tides pulled me
Inside my outsides and outside my ins

2

Was I born blind or did I learn to hate?
(I remember)
Smooth marbles, bright ashtrays
The smell of sawdust
A bullfrog in tall ferns

Where have the shining afternoons gone?
Whence the lily I was,
Intrepid sandpiper,
Buccaneer?

What’s love? - a leaning outward like a rose
I learned at the feet of soft caterpillars
What briefest lives, lives bravest.

3

The complicated self grows at a price.
The soul hides in a cave
Alone,
Deaf to the dove
And the murmuring dead,
Pondering stale enigmas of the mind.
Believe! Oh believe in the stair.
Follow the foolish fish into plein air.
(From dream comes language and from language dreams.)

4

The world turns, the tide goes in and out.
Indignities of age?
A shell has whispered my worth.
Sweet sooth of pebbles!
Catbird whom I love!
I shall not cease to search for songs
Till I become who’s singing all along.

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THREE

From anywhere to love's a journey
Down crumbling streets with dying vegetation
(The unrelenting stranger in the glass)
Past piled-up detritus
And places ghosts and spiders have forsaken.

Where are the guides?
Where the sign-posts?
The street-lights all are broken,
The phone-lines dead.

But to lie awake through the night in a cheap hotel,
An unspeakable poem coursing through the brain
Like a white rose that murders the heart's hate,
To endure, naked and nameless,
Till morning's merry finch and quivering lily,
The lapping shore emerging from the dark...

Compassion is the only true rebellion
Wisdom a way of standing, knees bent,
Arms out, straight-backed, face to the wind.

What we lack we must make
What we gain, give back
For the true gods are the rebels,
The discontented sky-dwellers
Pigeons cooing in the garbage heap
Chrysanthemums of the ghetto.

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FOUR

Endless enigmas plague the mind
The world’s a box we’re born inside
There may be answers but not here
The chicken or the egg? Unclear.

Is this the price of living?
Is there a ground of being
Known only to itself
A ground that flees from plenitude
To time and space and ignorance and love?

But look more carefully: the box has holes
Eternity shines through the temporal
When finite things suggest infinity
(Man’s to himself the greatest mystery).

At moments such as these the soul grows wise:
Gazing into a labyrinthine stone
Or lulled by lapping water at the shore
Besieged by the catbird’s tumbling refrain
Or reading old Pope’s Illiad on a train.

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FIVE

The day grows out of dark
A new creation
Light glimmerings, a solitary finch
Wind on water                                           
Soft banter of fishermen
Then a boisterous flock of geese passes over:
 Sun up in the east.
When the tide goes out
The dark rocks rear
With their shaggy sea-wreaths,
Their belts of barnacle.
On the largest: five cormorants arranged
Against the sky.
There is a harmony of the senses here,
A soft polyphony of birds in the warm salt air.
The sun’s majestic rhythm wreaths the hours
And slowly, the beach shifts with the seasons
And the generations of men.
They groan:                                                                                      
The beetle baking on his back,
The doomed fish on the hook,
The starveling bird.
And they exult:
The grasshopper in mid-air,
The placid heron on his shallow stream.
They groan and they exult
In this beautiful prison
In this mortal paradise.
And I am persuaded out of mind
By that gull’s circuitous flight
The pebbles’ incessant churning in foam.
I’m thoughtless as a crab
Who knows just how
and when
His ear on the sea floor
His eye on the tide.
Beautiful prison, mortal paradise!
To lose myself
In this or another moment
To feel the awakening ancient urge:
To be a mollusk gazing at the stars
Secret of secrets: agile equipose.
To belong!
I shall fly at sunset into the west
Beyond the bluffs                                                                                                                        
To where words die
In white light, certain at last
Of what endures.

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SIX

I used to think a song could save the world
Now I’m content with efficacious toil
The cool industrious labor
Between insight’s first flash and finished deed.

But who would feed a starving man a song?
Full-bellied poets chant into the dark
Sing if you like but Jesus! help the poor
Else threads that we imagine bind us break.

Be curious, be kind and fear not death.
Where is the center? Everywhere there’s love.
The young have so much cruelty to shed
Before they can approach the sick man’s bed.

Behold: the clock has stopped.
See now - they come, filtering through tilted blinds
All the clocks have stopped
And the drip, drip of intravenous fluid.
Gather now droll gods about the bed
Small, high-spirited
Summoned to the center, into sunlight
By the sweet scent of doom.

Be curious, be kind, fear not the night.
I remember riding the old bicycle
The one with the rusted basket
Along the hot cracked tar in mid-July
Among stately homes
With glimpses of the dunes and of the bay
Thinking about Flaubert or Mallarme
Neither spirit nor pure animal
Both present and apart, poised
Coming to know what time is
As if from the outside.

To the center!
And farewell to hypocrisy and lies
Farewell, dull consolations of the well-to-do
I would lighten my earthly load
Divest myself of home and of possessions
Become a runaway child in distant lands
Cambodia
Sri Lanka
Timbutktu
Teaching the girls and boys their ABC’s
And learning, just in time, humility.
Be curious, be kind, fear not the night
Best action is what yields deepest delight.

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