A commenter has sent some verse set on an indefinite beach, at once made familiar by things we all know: a half-drained glass of champagne beside a slice of cocktail salami on the sand, and sound of children’s voices; but unfamiliar, as if on a world that begins at the water’s edge where a tide threatens to take us away. For as long as there has been poetry the sea has been calling man home and away from home. John Masefield captured the sense in his famous lines:
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Let’s find out, on Whale Day.
WHALE DAY
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
Whether the sun has earlier exchanged
meaningful looks with earthly denizens
or not, we are uncertain, but a strange
hush settles on the surface, ocean gleams
under the new-washed air, —a time for flight
has not arrived yet as the banks go down,
the banks of clouds, I mean, to touch the sea
at her horizon. Here the air is clear.
And past the line of breakers,
where they play,
one is reminded of all salients
of land, all bays and inlets, bights and gulfs
of ocean, how there’s really only one
for all of us, to fight over and sail
across—or, spirit prompting, to watch whales
on Rosh Hashanah, humpbacks in this case,
some eight, maybe, a quarter mile offshore,
as this poor world goes straight to hell, some say,
though that is maybe not the whale’s eye view,
I don’t know. Let’s say after a short fast:
some champagne, brush a few stray grains of sand
off dropped salami.
—Is the world then
better aligned with how things ought to be?
But what uncertain structure in the thump
of oceans, surface pearl and violet green
beneath, makes leaving easy, as they stay
the course in that deep medium, to play
between the poles, but never in a line
easy to trace? If singing made the sun’s
refracted rays stop aging, we’d stay young
among the whales and porpoises, this time
the year drawing itself back, the abyss
somehow less threatening, as children run
right to the water’s edge.
Pennants and flags
of turbulent air earth elaborates
elicit unending streams of complaint
from sailors (we’re all sailors now). All saints
decamped, the field of the sea being bare
of all but vital light. Yet there is more:
We’re grateful for these terns, grateful for snow
-y plovers, for all birds that are as rare
as love, as honesty… The atmosphere
is one of children letting go balloons
of every color, and of dueling kites
that older kids would play with, were they here.
Let’s you and me be lonely, with such scraps
of cloud as are vouchsafed, whales moving on.
Is not this just the way it was to be?
Rosh Hashanah, September 30, 2008
V.09.2009
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