I’ll set you on fire along with
our babies? Well, he doesn’t mean it literally. This is coming from the depths
of some intense emotion, images of fire resolving into images of water. Maybe
he is insane, but all artists are a bit, maybe. He took it and ran with it. Let
pass from me this cup—daughters, children, are a draw on our energy and
emotions. They give back more than they cost, but for the infirm, the insane,
there may not be much to invest.
But I have other things on my
mind today, and it’s my blog. We’re at the beach in North Carolina, and here is
the poem I wrote today after a long walk on a gale-force day.
A Leak in the Ocean
Sometimes it’s enough to just be
there
For a moment. A gale from the
south
Pushes stinging waves of sand
Raindrops crack against my hood
Like June bugs on a windshield.
Still, this empty beach beckons.
No sensible human dares
Venture out on a day like this,
Leaving the shore to hunkering
gulls,
Willets and sandpipers probing
the wet
Sand. But so often the correct
Decision is to turn from a warm
Cottage, calm and strawberries
waiting,
And let a fierce Atlantic gale
Have you. Boiling and roaring
swings
The ceaseless surf, its sticky
molecules
Of life coalescing forms of foam
The wind scatters. A bluefish
jumps,
Then others, a school of silver
nightmare
The croakers and spots, the
weakfish and drums
Shrink in terror from in whatever
dreams
Their maker has descend on the
roiling
Bubbles and currents of sleep
offered
Such gentle fishes in the surf.
I stand buffeted, alone,
With wind and leaping fish,
violent
Water, the wind-savaged gulls
Who don’t care that I open my
trunks.
Salt for the salt sea, organic
And lively as the ocean brine,
The gale vaporizes the drops
That add their moisture to the
spray
Bathing the bluefish who jump
then blow
Away, amazed, maybe, that the
thin
Windy storm is more potent
Today than the compressed mad
Maelstrom from which they spring.
The wind pushes north up the
beach.
Rain soaks the atmosphere, and I
know
Why the blues are jumping: Their
limits
Have broken down. Churning sky
And storming crashes of gray
water
Confuse the elemental differences
Till the ocean foams with bubbles
And the air is driven with the
storm’s
Wild water and that warm trickle
I leaked in the mix. If fish
Can fly today, then I might
breath
Their element as well, head
Beneath the waves and chase the
croakers
One last terror to consider
Before they sink amongst the
broken
Shells. But blues’ teeth are
sharp.
I’ll keep to the streaming sand,
safe
From voracious bluefish gnashing
the surf.
KZ
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