The Ocean Downstairs

Not myself, lately,” they say.

Or, they say, “Where was I?”

Where?

Here: N 21.3069 °, not all that far above the waistline of the equator. And W 157.8483°, well to the side of the (hypothetical) meridian running pole to pole through Greenwich, England.

Or, trace a path through Calcutta / Mecca / Mexico City, on to the middle of nowhere. Marquesas down below; Japan dead ahead; Anchorage way, way up there.

Here, strong trade winds. Venus kissing the horn of the “waning” moon. Seeming to wane: moon’s always just as it is, but here down “below” we have our phases.

Stars, meanwhile, more faint but not fainting.

Sun deep breathing, ready to heave itself up and over Diamond Head. Strenuous recurrence, surely just for our well-being. Or could it be the sun depends on us? My poet-mother wrote, “For I was there when night had submerged the sun—as though beyond revival. But I was there and held a hand to morning, barely bobbed up. . . gasping for very bleeding life. I reached toward morn ing and it was preserved. It might have drowned, otherwise.”

Meanwhile, now, hints of light: twilight. “There is twilight at dawn and dusk,” Jack Gilbert observed. Righto: think twi / twin. Twilight. Twilight years. My twilight years. Running late, as they used to say. Shakespeare’s “black night” falling, “Death’s second self.”

But oh, the crepuscular at the break of day. Crack of dawn. Night worn out, ready for a nap.

When, for Paul Smyth, things are no longer “Vague, vague as all things were before the mill / Of language ground the world from Adam’s brain.” And, Smyth wrote, “Morning begins with all the world to say.”

All the world. But, only all the world? We’re informed the solar system orbits the center of our galaxy every several million years. That in the observable universe there are all kinds of galaxies (fifty to one hundred billion?), each with as many stars (one hundred thousand million?) as ours. And, lately, that there are many (an infinite number of?) universes. Or just a single plain ol’ multi-verse. Keep this in mind, even if your mind boggles.

Locally, however, “Nothing new under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes argued? Speakin’ for my Earth-bound self—Earth-bound despite frequent flyer miles & flights of fancy—I try to attend to the more proximate: conditions, real-or-apparent alterations, possible visitations, palpable miracles.

Still and yet, about our sun, a question:

What’s older than our sun?

Take a guess.

Answer: H₂O!

Yes, H₂O born out of that interstellar cloud of dust and gas that formed our solar system. Dust? Cosmic dust / extraterrestrial dust / space dust / intergalactic dust / interplanetary dust / circumplanetary dust. All water molecules on Earth, including the water molecules in each of us, were in that cloud billions of years ago. So we’re told.

Craving more H₂O, I have a daily case of John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” Here it’s not a problem: elevator “down”; glass door; several stairs. Gate. “Twelve gates to the city,” they sang when I was young. That heavenly city.

Through this gate, Masefield’s “grey dawn breaking.” Undulations, wrinkles— ocean, far as the eye can see. At sea level, sea not quite level. And, seeing the ocean? Contemplating the ocean? Beholding the ocean. Beholden to it.

Meanwhile: “If you see something,” Homeland Security advises, “say something.” I’m seeing. Saying, with ever-more-penultimate words. Joseph Joubert wrote, “Of the last word.—The last word must be the last... like a last hand that puts the last nuance on a color, nothing can be added to it.” But for methe-writer? Not there yet. Not quite there yet.

“Words fail me” goes the idiom. But here, at one’s feet? A small beach. High tide ebbing, having swept / packed / smoothed the sand. Enviable sand: shrived; absolved.

The intertidal. Down to this foreshore not expecting to be alone but, hopefully, to be the only one of my kind. Signs...