Collected Poems

AT THE SLACKENING OF THE TIDE

AT THE SLACKENING OF THE TIDE Today I saw a woman wrapped in rags Leaping along the beach to curse the sea. Her child lay floating in the oil, away From oarlock, gunwale, and the blades of oars. The skinny lifeguard, raging at the sky, Vomited sea, and fainted on the sand. The cold simplicity of evening falls Dead on my mind, And underneath the piles the •water Leaps up, leaps up, and sags down slowly, farther Than seagulls disembodied in the drag Of oil and foam. Plucking among the oyster shells a man Stares at the sea, that stretches on its side. Now far along the beach, a hungry dog Announces everything I knew before: Obliterate naiads weeping underground, Where Homer's tongue thickens with human howls. I would do anything to drag myself Out of this place: Root up a seaweed from the water, To stuff it in my mouth, or deafen me, Free me from all the force of human speech; Go drown, almost. Warm in the pleasure of the dawn I came To sing my song And look for mollusks in the shallows, The whorl and coil that pretty up the earth, While far below us, flaring in the dark, The stars go out. What did I do to kill my time today, After the woman ranted in the cold, The mellow sea, the sound blown dark aswine? 62 After the lifeguard rose up from the waves Like a sea-lizard with the scales washed off? Sit there, admiring sunlight on a shell? Abstract with terror of the shell, I stared Over the waters where God brooded for the living all one day. Lonely for weeping, starved for a sound of mourning, I bowed my head, and heard the sea far off Washing its hands. ALL THE BEAUTIFUL ARE BLAMELESS Out of a dark into the dark she leaped Lightly this day. Heavy with prey, the evening skiffs are gone, And drowsy divers lift their helmets off, Dry on the shore. Two stupid harly-charlies got her drunk And took her swimming naked on the lake. The waters rippled lute-like round the boat, And far beyond them, dipping up and down, Unmythological sylphs, their names unknown, Beckoned to sandbars where the evenings fall. Only another drunk would say she heard A natural voice Luring the flesh across the water. I think of those unmythological Sylphs of the trees. Slight but orplidean shoulders weave in dusk Before my eyes when I walk lonely forward To kick beer-cans from tracked declivities. If I, being lightly sane, may carve a mouth Out of the air to kiss, the drowned girl surely Listened to lute-song where the sylphs are gone. The living and the dead glide hand in hand SAINT JUDAS 63 ...