Myself—be Noon to Him
He left
my plight
wild and still
as lyric. Moths
in the sea
plume. A freak
of lightning,
no storm. The tides’
argument:
to evade
the shore,
or crest.
If impatience. If
orbital motion.
Master it.
—
So? So? the sea asks.
I envy the one-word lexicon,
the sea’s singular mastery.
So!—to declare certitude.
So?—to not care.
And so much to not care about!
Description, namely,
every word testing
what’s real
only to fail.
Today I feel sad.
But somehow
this is wrong.
Gulls disappear
into the palest sky.
I feel quiet.
I am not quite myself today.
Gray wings and gray clouds.
Godwit birds outrun the tide.
Today I am a fragment of shell
thinking of him. So?
Yellow beach grass struck by surf.
—
Meaning is the wing
but I did not mean
so much as meander.
The black hurt
gnawing at.
The black hurt he deemed shame.
And where should I go
now that I’ve reached the sea?
—
I was thinking about a time
before war,
when the sea was not a border
and we dove
into the punishing
waves. Some shore-noises
I forget: the hour shifting
with the tide-turn
like an octave drop, sand-scatter
against our bodies, phantom cries
from phantom children.
I want to write a poem with nothing in it.
No more birds tracing the coast,
no anxious clock, no lists of loss, no song
other than . . . Midday
amnesty. Fragment
of sun. I think
this is not the same beach.
Too thin a shoreline,
too close to town. 