4 posts tagged “ocean”
Names
If the sea is a cathedral, a tide pool
is a chapel. Sculpins dart under the wind
that blusters their cupped oceans.
Sculpted by wave on rock, their pockets of salt
grow thin from the rain, the suffocating
fresh water. Sculpin and hermit crab and limpet
endure the sea's absence, the lost comfort
of constant temperature, while the unconceived
sky drums the roof over their pooled world
with litanies of unbreathable torment.
Christ, I have no praise for you.
Beyond saying a vodka-wrecked troller
and shacks the color of the desire to die, beyond
saying predatory snails that glide on their bellies
like the penitent, flexing their borers,
beyond saying seraphim that bicker exactly like gulls,
the shells are my ears
sing no psalms except I can name
many small creatures in the world of a tide pool.
Christ, have mercy on all things that drown in air,
I have no praise for you. I say the tide:
Tide!
Tide!
Tide!
I say: Ebb!
Flood!
Ebb!
Flood!
I always start with "Ebb!"
I always end with "Flood!"
Peter Munro
Requiem
The angels I love
bicker over cod guts and snapper spines.
They joust for flounder skulls and pick the bones clean,
screaming. Their harsh, fine voices
break across my town
in a language lost to my kind,
thoughtless in the clear now of now
without death. Christ, walk down streets paved
with rain to me and you drown in my choir,
my angels beating prayer under wing
which is the want I have not loved
well. Where did my weather go? Meet me
where my hidden weather went,
where praise and rain
are never spent.
Peter Munro
The Fatal Shore
The horseshoe crab in frail armor-plate,
broken open as if by a javelin throw,
lay in the sand like a cracked jam-jar,
the son of some Trojan.
Achilles, too, arrived in medias res
at his mortal scene.
The booming foghorn, the groaning buoy,
tide by tide by tide
kept their mockeries to themselves.
Was there no end to them?
Lost Renaissance studies with a sepia cast,
the dunes receded in perspective.
Fog lounged in the marsh shallows.
A soda-colored dawn again and again
rubbed salt into the clapboards,
collapsing upon a radiant wild-eyed dailiness.
Dullness, too, was my god.
Tangled knobs of seaweed
drifted up the beach on the curt tide,
like Myrmidons out of work.
William Logan
Night Divers on the Ocean
To rock upon the night ocean
The night divers and me in the ship
The moon, a work of scrimshaw shines
The palest eye seen
A dragon's pearl-orb tossed among the stars
On the rocks, a seal barks low and deep
bass to the thrum of the boat's whine
below lights tickle the waters
and a mystery is hidden from me
In the warm night below
it will be as if my mother is swaying me
as I drift off deeper
still deeper below the covers
Lucy Simpson, Seattle, 12/2008
After Birth, Winter
Where is joy, if not in the basket
I brought you home in?
Your head wrinkled
from amnion ocean
your eyes tiny lagoons
perfect hungry blue
Your lamprey mouth opens to suck
in my pink aureola
and I shrink back
swimming backwards
to far crevasses to shut out your howls
that travel through the waters
between our bodies
once one skin
Only I have stone breasts
and tide-pools of blood
upon the luminescent tile
lit by a bulb's faint moon
I am hunted by your cries
hooks in flesh that pull me unwilling
to your god-like mouth
Small liquid pearls
of colostrum drip
Our waking was not peaceful
as the summer Sound
we sat at
with you safe inside
mumbling your thumb
that little clam
I did not know the fish
how agitated they swim
in search of food
circling worried
the watery womb
how the waters cleave to the shore
in the gyre of the winter wind
Lucy Simpson
Colorado Springs
11/22/2006
revised Seattle, 6/2008