Almost Unsaid

“Look what the tide washed in,” kids in Boston used to say when a friend showed up late. And, one might ask, as Octavio Paz did, “Who is the tide talking to, all night long?”

Here and now, ignore the dying Portuguese man-of-war and the skate egg cases, leave ghost crabs to their own devices (crabs somehow getting by without the virtual). Look out at the empty-seeming horizontal expanse of ocean to the so aptly named horizon.

Overhead, catching my eye, pairs of pelagic fairy terns (manu-o-Kū in Hawaiian, Cygis alba rothschildi). Whiter than white, swooping and diving, skimming the waves for squid, flying fish, or other vertebrates driven up through the liquid mirror by predators. Perhaps not just foraging but, hardly unaware of their beauty, hungry for reflections of themselves.

Then, in tandem, a pair’s four wings fluttering in midair as if holding steady to embrace or kiss, as if courting or spooning, the terns spiral up and up, finally out of sight. To Saint Peter’s pearly gates? Perhaps, though, seeing them return, maybe not. Such high-flying just to demonstrate that they can, putting on a show for each other? For us?

For sure, it pays to look up. Also overhead, skating downwind, a frigate bird, ‘iwa, seven-foot wingspan, forked tail. Occasional “kleptoparasite”—‘iwa means “thief” in Hawaiian—and, Derek Walcott wrote, “disdainful” as it looks down while the “trade wind tirelessly frets / the water.”

But this ocean. Green / blue-green / jade / blue-black. Surface: boundary between water and atmosphere. Undulating, bending. Reflecting, refracting. Trickster. Chameleon.

Such watching: fishing without tackle. And, nothing caught? Sky not super-glued to ocean? Wallace Stevens: “Then the sea / And heaven rolled as one and from the two / Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.”

The seamless sky-ocean interface: a mere ten or twelve miles off, we’re to believe, without swimming out to confirm. Also to believe that from this archipelago south to Antarctica it’s seven thousand miles “clear sailing.” One agrees to stipulate it’s so.

Pablo Neruda wrote that, being by the ocean, “no hay que decir nada”— nothing needs saying. Though, as the poet (of course) went on, a wave “perhaps it says its name,” but “Who / can I ask what it said to me?”

Similarly, Robert Hass teased, “I won’t say much for the sea,” except that— inevitably—his next word was except. As in, “except that it was, almost, / the color of sour milk.”

About the sea, for poets and others, there’s quite a bit to want / need to say. Consider Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, who struggles to describe a single wave as it “continues to grow and gain strength until the clash with contrary waves gradually dulls it and makes it disappear, or else twists it until it is confused in one of the many dynasties of oblique waves slammed against the shore.”

All this transpiring in what Jonathan Raban termed “an unruly brew of shifting planes and collapsing hillocks.”

The ocean in Oceania, with, not surprisingly, moments of the oceanic. Moments, that is, of the self merging—merged!—with all the rest of it all.