dolphins crossing the horizon

I missed yesterday, but here is a poem for today. 

Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder.

Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea.

This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells

and the ocean, I'll count my encounters 

with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, 

with the factory of liquid fold and unfold, 

there was Kittery in the morning and the tent-eating tide,

the naked bland Greek crotches of Sfakia. 

My dog is realizing she doesn't like salt water, I 

that a spiritual person could see angels in white winged waves, 

just as another might think of beer. Drunken angels abound. 

I had an actual dream last night, not a, to loosen 

the imaginative stops, I need to invite Carl Jung into the poem 

kind of dream, but my father and I and other men 

tried to save a crop that was probably just suburban 

crewcut lawn grass. I didn't know what to do 

and bleated questions until my father said that asking was rude. 

Which is when I tried to kill him, kill the idea 

that to not know but want to, that to ask, 

to form the voice into waves flowing out from mind, was wrong, 

and couldn't kill him because when I tried to lift 

so I could smash him down, he was heavy as Icarus falling 

and I woke to the sense of a shape breathing the darkness

of the room. I drove eleven hours to remember 

only the second dream in my life. A few feet to my right, 

a ghost crab pitches sand from a hole, its eyes 

on stalks above its sideways life. Sanderlings 

skitter wet sand and with their long bills, probe 

for small crustaceans, I dug one out yesterday 

as water trickled home, sunlight ballrooming 

on its shattering surface, the creature was white 

and writhed, the size of what I pick from my navel 

at the end of the day. My first thought was that I needed 

a name, a sound to wrap around the image, to which I'd attach 

other breaths, breaths of how it lives and what it eats, 

and immediately wanted to know nothing 

except how it felt on my skin, the smallest kiss 

to ever cross my fingerprint. Eleven hours 

to close my eyes and have them turn around. 

At this rate, I'll recall one more dream before I die. 

In the distance, black triangles surface and submerge, 

dolphins crossing the horizon like the teeth 

of a saw cutting this ocean from an ocean that has asked 

to sail away.

—Bob Hicock, "Rising dream tide," originally published—I believe—in the Spring 2006 issue of Ploughshares, although I definitely got it from wintercreek.