Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Out of the Sea, at Hatteras

D AV E S M I T H Out of the Sea, at Hatteras For days, nothing. For days, sea-brine. Watching waves, waiting for the graveyard to rise, eye-sailing where the wrecks wade through the centuries. The salty bones in little boxes drift. They can’t get away. Spars and masts and lean ribs in blue moss, the spines of salesmen bloodied on freeways, stars fallen in their daughters’ eyes. Bones crossed on a median, tufts, curls flow in sudden breeze of trucks: once a ducktail humming Be-Bop-A-Lula. Lulu. La la, sand sizzles, and squint for the negative, mercury, mercurial, winged heel: a woman’s. The eternal who hello, there. Comes, goes. For days. You could set your clock. Ribs well-rigged. What a pair of chines all the way down to slop and giggle of surf. But why this dark push of water? Forever vengeance surely, surely, this graveyard where 62 ❚ The 1970s just out of surf she must have come, loves water, loves love, you can tell, always could, way they walk. Be-Bop-A sneer at death. Lady of the sea if you own everything from here to Nag’s Head won’t you give us a little life: slosh in the bones, moss-moves all night like a dancer’s hair, you don’t see it. It’s there. What does she care? Oh lady won’t you tell me why your feet are green and sea-chummy? Or if not, tell what a simple shell says. This day is pinched, tight as a safety pin but you know it ends and so do I. Well, what’s enough? Tell us how to be. All we want, mother, burial and a small riff of rain’s honors. The 1970s ❚ 63 ...