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