Read by the author.
Late August, your estuary, now
Flattens gray, and the eroded
Pilings stagger from landfall
Like upside-down legs, or
Geometric marks you see in
Generations of outdated
Cave-wall photographs—all
Finger flute and crosshatch. What
Chases the glint of
Light off the water
Flattens, too, or flatters, the
Chiselled horizon beneath
Clouds so shaved white
They take shape, beneath this
Sky, as humps, or
Hulks, or afterlives of hills,
As if to ask,
“Where will you return?”
Here, Sir Patrick Spens
And his good lords
Capsized so deep under the
Sea in the rain-black, ballad
Passages of the Norton anthology
Of poetry in English, it’s still scarcely
English at all. Or was it four
Thousand miles from here, in my
Loch Lomond Boulevard
Bedroom, in Harris County,
Texas, where the square
Windows inside the flowing
Foam of the wall open into waves
Of knockout roses, which in
Summer are straining red,
Unheard, under the fathoms of
Hardly visible miles—what I wish
I might have called tawny
Scores of star music, or swollen
Petals, or shy air, or common
Ground, had I known,
At the time, that I’d one day
Feel like the last
Jew alive, with no
Children in the future
To stand before him, bare-
Handed, bareheaded,
Like a sailor of gravity
Through a lifetime of settling
Down as fog or leaves
Or a stone rolling soft as rain—
As if the sea is always inside him
And his mind a floating cloud
Sloping into the marshlight
Unfurling in a daydream
Brimmed with the tresses of three
Confabulating hot-air balloons
To remind him of the voices
Of glitter and foam, spiral or opal,
Like slate-gray voices of the dead.
How many questions to pose about
Rotting and ocean, or mud and sky,
Cloudburst, or downpour,
Are fit for a life of poems?
A man’s face blooms up, or sinks,
And the waves are windrows that
Buffet over the sounding of his mouth,
A misery any man takes to
Heart from ridiculously old-fashioned lore
Lying at the bottom of the ocean’s floor.