every ocean is the same ocean

I am not one of nature's collectors, except when it comes to books, and especially when it comes to poetry books in the month of April. Whoops. I'm not mad about it, though! Books are great! Yesterday and today, Lucy and I went to a bunch of different local Houston bookstores and bought more books than we really should have (so many good things, though) in the name of Indie Bookstore Day and the Houston Book Crawl, which is on through the end of the month. They gave us a bingo card and everything! How were we supposed to resist? Anyway, this poem is not from any of the books I bought today, but it is from one of the poetry books we picked up when we were at the Strand in New York last week.

        for the occasion of a dear friends' wedding

Perhaps you've noticed
the way someone yawning
blooms a yawn in your own mouth
as though it were your idea
& not a hand me down,
the way an ocean wave
is not invented out of nothing, but
arrives from somewhere else,
sent from one shoreline of the lopsided planet
to another, so that every ocean
is the same ocean, no matter
what edge of it you are dipping your toes in.
You can stand on a cliff & watch a storm roll towards you,
passed around the globe like wet gossip,
one storm begetting another,
just as my middle school science teacher taught me
that matter cannot be created nor destroyed,
just shifted from one state to the next,
which is comforting on days you miss the dinosaurs
or need to be reminded that many people had to fall in love
with a face at least a little bit like yours
in order for yours to get here.
Maybe God had a good idea one time
& the rest has all been dominoes:
a thunderclap begets a hiccup begets an undertow begets
your certainty that a face was made for you to love it,
but ask the coral reef, who knows we are not good ideas
& definitely not new ones,
more like galactic putty smushed into human form,
who spend so much of our brief time here
losing sight of the storms we came from,
the weather that moves through us,
that we unleash on everyone else.
& who can blame us?
There is no shame in forgetting
that our atoms
once held together some other jellyfish,
when her cheek on your pillow makes your skin
too electric to be called anything but New.
When my grandmother was
nearing the end of her time in the body I knew her in,
she started to lose herself
memory first, but language close behind.
She misused words, mixed up phrases, said things incorrectly.
When she met someone,
instead of saying, it is a pleasure to meet you,
she would say,
it is a pleasure to love you.
She understood
that what feels unknown
is an opportunity for remembering.
In which case, in some future,
when two red-shouldered hawks
see each other for what they think is the first time,
they might suddenly recall
that there was once a day
when we traveled many miles,
some of us whole lifetimes,
so that we could meet you,
here, in love,
& what more evidence will they need
(what more evidence do you need?) to see
that it is
a sincere pleasure to love you
again & again.

—Sarah Kay, "Epithalamion," from A Little Daylight Left (The Dial Press, 2025). Sarah Kay is a slam poet, so I do recommend the video of this poem. For Lucy, obviously.

islands and lemons

This is a summer poem, and it's not actually that summery today. But it's also a New York City poem, and a love poem, and I've been wanting to post it while in New York for a while. We'll be down on Bleecker later tonight to see a show at the Lucille Lortel.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

—Derek Walcott (1930-2017), "Bleecker Street, Summer," from Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

if you stay too long it will kill you

Sometimes I get poems stuck in my head, kind of like songs; today it's been this one. (I love this one.)

O California, don't you know the sun is only a god
if you learn to starve for him? I'm bored with the ocean

I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow
I know, I'm strange, too much light makes me nervous

at least in this land where the trees always bear green.
I know something that doesn't die can’t be beautiful.

Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror

all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you
is light & it's gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you

& it's so sad, you know? You're the only warm thing for miles
& the only thing that can't shine.

—Danez Smith, "I'm Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense," which is a killer fucking title. Originally published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 54, Issue 3, Summer 2015.

each of us is a prodigal

This poem is actually for yesterday—I'll post another one later today for my birthday—but I had an exhausting day of lying by the pool and getting a massage yesterday, and fell asleep early. Vacation is just so much work! Seriously, though, I have thus far been very circumspect in terms of posting poems that make me think of our gay pirates, and part of that is because I have a long history of posting poems that have to do with the sea and love and boats and lighthouses and so on, and have already posted many of my favorites. But on the other hand, I'm never, ever gonna be done with those particular themes.

For Derek Walcott

An island is one great eye
    gazing out, a beckoning lighthouse,
searchlight, a wishbone compass,
    or counterweight to the stars.
When it comes to outlook & point
    of view, a figure stands on a rocky ledge
peering out toward an archipelago
    of glass on the mainland, a seagull’s
wings touching the tip of a high wave,
    out to where the brain may stumble.

But when a mind climbs down
    from its high craggy lookout
we know it is truly a stubborn thing,
    & has to leaf through pages of dust
& light, through pre-memory & folklore,
    remembering fires roared down there
till they pushed up through the seafloor
    & plumes of ash covered the dead
shaken awake worlds away, & silence
    filled up with centuries of waiting.

Sea urchin, turtle, & crab
    came with earthly know-how,
& one bird arrived with a sprig in its beak,
    before everything clouded with cries,
a millennium of small deaths now topsoil
    & seasons of blossoms in a single seed.
Light edged along salt-crusted stones,
    across a cataract of blue water,
& lost sailors’ parrots spoke of sirens,
    the last words of men buried at sea.

Someone could stand here
    contemplating the future, leafing
through torn pages of St. Augustine
    or the prophecies by fishermen,
translating spore & folly down to taproot.
    The dreamy-eyed boy still in the man,
the girl in the woman, a sunny forecast
    behind today, but tomorrow’s beyond
words. To behold a body of water
    is to know pig iron & mother wit.

Whoever this figure is,
    he will soon return to dancing
through the aroma of dagger’s log,
    ginger lily, & bougainvillea,
between chants & strings struck
    till gourds rally the healing air,
& till the church-steeple birds
    fly sweet darkness home.
Whoever this friend or lover is,
    he intones redemptive harmonies.

To lie down in remembrance
    is to know each of us is a prodigal
son or daughter, looking out beyond land
    & sky, the chemical & metaphysical
beyond falling & turning waterwheels
    in the colossal brain of damnable gods,
a Eureka held up to the sun’s blinding eye,
    born to gaze into fire. After conquering
frontiers, the mind comes back to rest,
    stretching out over the white sand.

—Yusef Komunyakaa, "Islands," Poetry, 2012.

clear water

In her splendor islanded
This woman burning like a charm of jewels
An army terrifying and asleep
This woman lying within the night
Like clear water lying on closed eyes
In a tree's shadow
A waterfall halted halfway in its flight
A rapid narrow river suddenly frozen
At the foot of a great and seamless rock
At the foot of a mountain
She is lake-water in April as she lies
In her depth binding poplar and eucalyptus
Fishes or stars burning between her thighs
Shadow of birds scarcely hiding her sex
Her breasts two still villages under a peaceful sky
This woman lying here like a white stone
Like water in the moon in a dead crater
Not a sound in the night not moss nor sand
Only the slow budding of my words
At the ear of water at the ear of flesh
Unhurried running
And clear memorial
Here is the moment burning and returned
Drowning itself in itself and never consumed

—Octavio Paz (1914-1998), "In Her Splendor Islanded," translated by Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980); translation published in Poetry, June 1958.

dolphins leaping into commas

I am leaving for vacation very early tomorrow morning, which is exciting! Admittedly this is the third time I have been on vacation to Mexico in a year (lol), but I am still really looking forward to it, because honestly there is nothing like a beach vacation with friends and fruity drinks.

Give me a church
made entirely of salt.
Let the walls hiss
and smoke when
I return to shore.

I ask for the grace
of a new freckle
on my cheek, the lift
of blue and my mother’s
soapy skin to greet me.

Hide me in a room
with no windows.
Never let me see
the dolphins leaping
into commas

for this water-prayer
rising like a host
of sky lanterns into
the inky evening.
Let them hang

in the sky until
they vanish at the edge
of the constellations — 
the heroes and animals
too busy and bright to notice.

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Sea Church," Poetry (July/August 2017)

think of the storm

I thought we might have a little Elizabeth Bishop, tonight.

for Thomas Edwards Wanning

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

Think how they must look now, the mangrove keys
lying out there unresponsive to the lightning
in dark, coarse-fibred families,

where occasionally a heron may undo his head,
shake up his feathers, make an uncertain comment
when the surrounding water shines.

Think of the boulevard and the little palm trees
all stuck in rows, suddenly revealed
as fistfuls of limp fish-skeletons.

It is raining there. The boulevard
and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack
are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.

Now the storm goes away again in a series
of small, badly lit battle-scenes,
each in "Another part of the field."

Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat
tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge;
think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.

—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), "Little Exercise," in this case from Elizabeth Bishop: The Collected Poems 1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989).

busy with whales

I did not see any whales today, but I did sit in a palapa on the beach for the whole morning, and I certainly considered the possibility of whales (we're on the Caribbean, so whales are pretty unlikely, but I suppose you never know). It's the first full day of vacation, and I woke up feeling pretty great—well-rested, relaxed, ready to lie by the pool and drink cold beverages and read. It's really nice to be here.

One of my favorite things about Billy Collins is the way his poems are so straightforward and simple—even, dare I say, prosaic—in some ways, and then just gently and lovingly punch you right in the face.

Today I was awakened by strong coffee
and the awareness that the earth is busy with whales
even though we can't see any
unless we have embarked on a whale watch,
which would be disappointing if we still couldn't see any.

I can see the steam rising from my yellow cup,
the usual furniture scattered about,
and even some early light filtering through the palms.

Meanwhile, thousands of whales are cruising
along at various speeds under the seas,

crisscrossing one another, slaloming in and out
of the Gulf Stream, some with their calves
traveling alongside—such big blunt heads they have!

So is it too much to ask that one day a year
be set aside for keeping in mind
while we step onto a bus, consume a ham sandwich,
or stoop to pick up a coin from a sidewalk
the multitude of these mammoth creatures
coasting between the continents,
some for the fun of it, others purposeful in their journeys,

all concealed under the sea, unless somewhere
one breaks the surface
with an astonishing upheaval of water
and all the people in yellow slickers
rush to one side of the boat to point and shout
and wonder how to tell their friends about the day they saw a whale?

—Billy Collins, "Whale Day," from Whale Day: And Other Poems (New York: Random House, 2020).

dazzling lurch of the sea

I had a plan to post another Mexican poet today, but then I was reading Pablo Neruda, because...well, let's be honest, when am I not reading Pablo Neruda. So we're going with Pablo Neruda, and with this one because the beach was glorious today. I need at least 100 years to post all of Cien sonetos de amor. 

Al golpe de la ola contra la piedra indócil 

la claridad estalla y establece su rosa 

y el círculo del mar se reduce a un racimo, 

a una sola gota de sal azul que cae. 

Oh radiante magnolia desatada en la espuma, 

magnética viajera cuya muerte florece 

y eternamente vuelve a ser y a no ser nada: 

sal rota, deslumbrante movimiento marino. 

Juntos tú y yo, amor mío, sellamos el silencio, 

mientras destruye el mar sus constantes estatuas 

y derrumba sus torres de arrebato y blancura, 

porque en la trama de estos tejidos invisibles

del agua desbocada, de la incesante arena, 

sostenemos la única y acosada ternura.

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks 

the clear light bursts and enacts its rose, 

and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds, 

to one drop of blue salt, falling. 

O bright magnolia bursting in the foam, 

magnetic transient whose death blooms 

and vanishes—being, nothingness—forever: 

broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea. 

You and I, Love, together we ratify the silence, 

while the sea destroys its perpetual statues, 

collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness: 

because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics, 

galloping water, incessant sand, 

we make the only permanent tenderness.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), IX from 100 Love Sonnets, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

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.

what can I tell you of that other country

One last extra poem, for those days I missed in the middle of the month. This is another one I would have loved to post while I was on my adventures in the Mediterranean, if only I'd remembered to bring it with me.

The little now is all I ever knew,
this seaport city of my years,
this shore I walk on, that the tides
gnaw as the sea rises and keeps rising.

What can I tell of what occurred
before my birth, that foreign, sunrise land?
I cannot know it, though my isle
was once a part of it. I used to watch
the long, bright caravans creep down the roads
from fabled mountains, out to the promontory
of the morning where my city stood.

Those roads are long since undersea.
We only have what drifts to us from there
over dark waters: fragments
of carven wood, a hollow green glass globe.
Some papers in a sealed chest
in a strange writing, half effaced.
A storm-blown bird, whose song
receives no answer here.

I sent my ships to rumored western lands,
heavy with hopeful cargo.
And for a long time they returned
laden with wine and honeycomb,
silk, linen, opals, amethysts.
The sailors sang as they rowed in to harbor.
All they brought they laid out on the beach.
I went in splendor in the city then.

Few ships go out now, few come back, and those
are empty, dancing on the waves.
What can I tell you of that other country
from which my caravels return
so lightly, with thin sails that let light through,
and thin sides, and grey-haired sailors,
and the broken amphorae empty?

—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), "The Merchant of Words," from Life Sciences: New Poems, 2006-2010, although in this case actually from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

in storms and at sunset

Today we are in Kotor, Montenegro, which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been in my life. It's kind of overwhelming. It also started raining part of the way through the day, and we got slightly drenched and then took the tender back to our boat in the rain, which was a little bit magic.

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught  
in some moorings. I am always tying up  
and then deciding to depart. In storms and  
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide  
around my fathomless arms, I am unable  
to understand the forms of my vanity  
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder  
in my hand and the sun sinking. To  
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage  
of my will. The terrible channels where  
the wind drives me against the brown lips  
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet  
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and  
if it sinks, it may well be in answer  
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

—Frank O’Hara, "To the Harbormaster" from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957.

beside the unharvested sea

Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men; sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious,
stay at last, for against your fury
and your mad fight,
the line of heroes stands, godlike:

Akroneos, Oknolos, Elatreus,
helm-of-boat, loosener-of-helm, dweller-by-sea,
Nauteus, sea-man,
Prumneos, stern-of-ship,
Agchilalos, sea-girt,
Elatreus, oar-shaft:
lover-of-the-sea, lover-of-the-sea-ebb,
lover-of-the-swift-sea,
Ponteus, Proreus, Oöos:
Anabesneos, who breaks to angeras a wave to froth:
Amphiolos, one caught between wave-shock and wave-shock:
Eurualos, board sea-wrack,
like Ares, man’s death,
and Naubolidos, best in shape,
of all first in size:
Phaekous, sea’s thunderbolt—
ah, crash on crash of great names—
man-tamer, man’s-help, perfect Laodamos:
and last the sons of great Alkinöos,
Laodamos, Halios, and god-like Clytomeos.

Of all nations, of all cities,
of all continents,
she is favoured above the rest,
for she gives men as great as the sea,
to battle against the elements and evil:
greater even than the sea,
they live beyond wrack and death of cities,
and each god-like name spoken
is as a shrine in a godless place.

But to name you,
we, reverent, are breathless,
weak with pain and old loss,
and exile and despair—
our hearts break but to speak
your name, Oknaleos—
and may we but call you in the feverish wrack
of our storm-strewn beach, Eretmeos,
our hurt is quiet and our hearts tamed,
as the sea may yet be tamed,
and we vow to float great ships,
named for each hero,
and oar-blades, cut of mountain-trees
as such men might have shaped:
Eretmeos, and the sea is swept,
baffled by the lordly shape,
Akroneos has pines for his ship’s keel;
to love, to mate the sea?Ah there is Ponteos,
the very deep roar,
hailing you dear—
they clamour to Ponteos,
and to Proëosleap, swift to kiss, to curl, to creep,
lover to mistress.

What wave, what love, what foam,
For Oöos who moves swift as the sea?
Ah stay, my heart, the weight
of lovers, of loneliness
drowns me,
alas that their very names
so press to break my heart
with heart-sick weariness,
what would they be,
the very gods,
rearing their mighty length
beside the unharvested sea?

—H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), "Sea Heroes," originally published (as 'Sea-Heroes') in Coterie, No. 4, 1920, 44-6, and collected in Hymen in 1921.

and a star to steer her by

I've never posted this poem before, because every time I think about posting this poem, the Kris Delmhorst song starts playing in my head. It's a lovely song, and there is a really wonderful Slings and Arrows vid by heresluck to the song, which also starts playing in my head every time I think about this poem. But I also love the poem, so here's to you, John Masefield.

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must 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.

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life.
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

—John Masefield (1878-1967), "Sea Fever," from Salt-Water Ballads, 1902.

language uncommon and agile as truth

Some days are Adrienne Rich days, and there's just nothing you can do about it except post some Adrienne Rich. I usually love her poetry, so this is not a hardship.

(I have more mixed feelings about her politics, which were sometimes phenomenally feminist and groundbreaking and wonderful, and sometimes deeply problematic and transphobic; but if I stopped loving poets because I disagreed with some of their politics I would be super screwed when it comes to most poetry. It is, as always—at least, I think so—very much worth being aware of the nuance and complexity and occasional awfulness of people and their ideas; but that doesn't mean you can't love some (or even a lot) of what they have to say, even while you hate some of the other things they have to say. Loving problematic things.)

If I've reached for your lines   (I have)
   like letters from the dead that stir the nerves
dowsed you for a springhead
   to water my thirst
dug into my compost skeleton and petals
   you surely meant to catch the light:

—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered
   stateless underground
      have I a plea?

If I've touched your finger
   with a ravenous tongue
      licked from your palm a rift of salt
if I've dreamt or thought you
   a pack of blood   fresh-drawn
      hanging darkred from a hook
higher than my heart
   (you who understand transfusion)
      where else should I appeal?

A pilot light lies low
   while the gas jets sleep
      (a cat getting toed from stove
into nocturnal ice)
   language uncommon and agile as truth
      melts down the most intractable silence

A lighthouse keeper's ethics:
   you tend for all or none
      for this you might set your furniture on fire
A this we have blundered over
   as if the lamp could be shut off at will
      rescue denied for some

and still a lighthouse be

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "For This" from Fox, 1999.

In not entirely unrelated news, I have been feeling exceptionally lucky in my friends and chosen family, this week. You guys are great, you know that?

we have lingered in the chambers of the sea

Zoe tells me that this poem can never be overplayed, and I hope that she is right. Not everybody read it in high school, after all, and hopefully not everybody who did read it as an adolescent had it (temporarily, in my case) ruined for them by inept high school teachers. I love this poem - it is, and always will be, one of my very favorites, overplaying and inept high school teachers or no - and as much as I love Four Quartets and the The Wasteland, it always comes back to this one, with Eliot, in the end.

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

~T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915.

It is another stunningly beautiful day, and I have strawberries, though not peaches, and my trousers are, in fact, slightly rolled. I went to buy bagels at the shop in Brick Lane this morning, and stopped at the outdoor Sunday Brick Lane Barbecue on the way back, and now I am in the kitchen with tea and books and coffee spoons, working. Visions and revisions. How should I presume?

like a land of dreams

Another old favorite for you, today:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

~Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dover Beach, 1851-2, first published 1867. I never do tire of this poem. I think it's too beautiful for that.

the thing itself and not the myth

For JJ. And also because it's a really wonderful poem.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

~Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck" from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, 1973.