Sea Poems
1
We are attracted to the sea,
Calm or tempestuous.
We find ourselves entranced by it.
Why does it bewitch us so?
What is the reason for its enchantment?
Is it some primeval call of the wild?
Some ancient instinct?
Are we drawn by the mystery of its creation
When the spirit hovered over the deep,
Calling into being the sacramental waters,
Darkly moving, cleansing the dawning shores?
Or is it a dim memory of the ancient dread
Spawned by the sea since the morning of the world
That captivates us so?
Is our attraction part of our affinity with the sea—
The elemental and the mortal,
Both breathing, pulsating, sleeping,
Sharing identical moods,
Sometimes calm and steady,
At others full and overflowing?
Perhaps the sea
Provides the only glimpse of the eternal that we can know.
For the sea is changeless, outside time,
Revealing no passing of time.
Unlike the earth, it is not worn down by time.
It does not shrivel, crack, or shrink with the seasons.
No one can say, even after a thousand years,
That the sea has changed.
Leave it for a while, and when you return
It remains unaltered,
A titanic presence,
Grand, majestic, waiting.
It is never young or old
As the land is young or old.
Eternity is for the sea.
2
When we were young
And the world, we thought, was new,
Our sea was near and intimate.
We knew it as gulches, tide pools, and coves
That invited curiosity, and wonder, and play.
We knew early the landwash,
Prickly, slippery, enticing.
We peered into pools and under kelp
Searching for darting thorny-backs,
And small shore crabs scuttling
Sideways under protective rocks,
And tiny flatfish, sensing our hovering shadow,
Camouflaged themselves under concealing sand
Before we stabbed them with our prong.
At low tide in our thigh rubbers we
Sloused, sloshed, and stumbled
Our way out the cove;
Picking wrinkles off strouters
While we sang “Wrinkle, wrinkle, put out your horn”,
And waited for their little antennae to appear.
If no response, we used a darker version
“Wrinkle, wrinkle, put out your horn,
Or we’ll kill your father or mother.”
We watched schools of caplin,
Dark underwater clouds from a distance,
Move in unison towards beaches to spawn,
Stranding themselves upon the sand,
A death-dance of flashing, glittering silver.
We stood on sea worn rocks
And teased the white-capped waves
To catch us.
They swelled, billowed, and raged
Tantalizingly to our heels
As we scampered laughing to higher ground.
In early spring the south wind
Buckled and cracked ice into rafts,
And Huck-Finn-like we became explorers, adventurers,
Pushing them around the harbour
With longers,
Ignoring both the commands of our worried mothers,
And the risks to our lives.
On the lazy, dazzling days of summer,
The harbour shimmering, glimmering in the sun,
The soft air salt-clean and soughing,
We rowed and drifted out the harbour,
Passing Middle Rock, the Ghost Rock,
With sea weeds black and long as a woman’s hair
Waggling in the gentle surge,
Through the tickle to Duck Island,
We lay on the grass watching, listening to
The twittering sand-pipers,
And the sighing wind bending the trembling buttercups.
These particulars of then:
Mystery, tragedy, and playfulness
In cove, and pool and harbour
Permeate our present imaginings
And ponderings of the sea.
What we think is now and new
Is also old and then.
Then and now are one.
3
The sea is an artist,
Chiselling out caves,
Hammering hieroglyphs into headlands,
Carving ice-bergs into cathedrals,
And moulding ancient stones.
The sea with its regular rhythms
And patterned tides is a poem
That only those who know it,
And have faith in it
Can interpret—
The faith and the knowledge
And the interpretation are one.
4
The sea is a charm of voices:
Hissing white caps rollicking towards shore,
Guttural grumblings of beach rocks,
Ghostly whine of wind in the riggings,
Wailing fog horns issuing their languorous grieving,
A widow’s sudden cry from dreams
When salt spray hits her window panes,
The haunting sea-shell voices of a distant sea,
The Clicking, clacking of debris against the shore
After a storm,
The rising tide creaking, whispering on a calm evening,
The chuckling waves against the skiff
While waiting for the tide;
These are all sea voices,
Pervasive voices,
Part of the sea tradition,
A summation of memories,
A surge of unrequited longing.
5
Sometimes the sea is heartless,
Unmoved by tragedy or sorrow
Tossing battered skeletons of schooners,
Splintered lobster pots, shreds of torn nets,
Whitened backs of crabs, blanched star fish
Against sunkers, the ancients cliffs, and into coves.
It lines the faces of wives
Peering through storm-lashed windows
Waiting nervously for the familiar sound of
Voices coming up the garden path.
It is unperturbed by the cries of sealers
Lying somewhere on a melting ice-pan to die
While this waste of white dissolves,
Becomes an invisible cemetery of the deep,
Unknown and unmarked.
It has an arrogant indifference
To weeping hearts floating houses
From abandoned out ports
With chimneys ready for smoke
And curtains still bellowing in the windows.
It has no pity for fishermen
Trying to deal with its capricious ways.
I remember in particular one day
And the remembering brings back the ancient dread.
It was a regular mauzy August day,
Sea gulls wheeling and diving;
The Store-House Island cushioned on air,
Floating on sea mist.
North of us, toward the island,
There appeared a dark spot of water
“About the size of a house”,
Wind “pitching on the water,” Someone said.
Suddenly the dark spot
Mutated into a north east gale;
Wind-tattered white caps
Hit us in the face like a howling drift of snow.
We staggered giddily on the tawts,
Grabbing the roof of the engine house,
Clinging to gunnels.
“Hold on,” the skippered cried,
But the words drifted away on the wind,
His frantic gestures a wild pantomime.
As suddenly as it came the wind died,
As if an invisible presence
Had commanded, “Peace be still.”
But it left behind enormous waves,
Rolling white-green hills of water,
The tickle feather-white,
Shoals wind-spumed,
The coves foam-lathered.
The skiff surged through Middle Tickle
To the calm waters of the harbour
And to the spontaneous reception
Of the nervous, waiting women,
Dancing with unconstrained joy
On the stage head, waving their arms
And laughing through their tears.
There is no ego when confronting the sea,
No imposing of the self,
Only vulnerability, openness to possibility,
And the consciousness of the moment.
6
The eternal sea, sleeping and groaning,
Its depths cold, untouched by the sun,
Begetting stories of primordial creatures
Stirring the imagination;
Reminding us of an ancient time
When the Brontosaurus lumbered
Through steaming swamps.
One evening he told us about
Leviathan rising out of the sea like a tower,
Water glistening down over its sides.
The shark, blood cold as the ocean,
Knife fin slicing the water,
Striking terror.
The drasher vaulting into the air,
Nose-diving a whale unto a waiting sword fish.
Were these escapees from the primeval slime?
What other creatures haunt the black abyss?
Are there some that do not love the sun?
Was the siren singing but an imaginary voice?
The sea is imbued with unearthly powers:
On rain-black nights phantoms come drifting in;
Spectral lights circle Middle Rock,
Tokens of drownings long ago.
Out of windless stillness
The supernatural sometimes comes:
A white ship, sails full,
Sliding silently through a foamless sea,
And vanishing into thin air.
Sometimes
This atmosphere of the otherworldly
Infused our mundane perceptions of the sea.
“Throw out some cod livers for the bawks”, he said.
Suddenly bawks materialized out of a bank of fog,
Hovering, diving, skimming the water,
And gulping the liver as they passed.
Then, like apparitions, they faded through the fog,
Quickening thoughts of another realm beyond the veil.
“Knock off whistling”, he commanded,
“Don’t you know it’s unlucky to whistle on the water”?
“And turn over that cover. Never leave anything
Bottom up on a boat.”
And then as the green water
Rolled high and menacingly behind him at the tiller,
I noticed that he made
The sign of the cross on the wave.
7
The sea knows no fragmentation,
No illusion of separateness.
Fishermen split, slice, and rend it
With boats, anchors, trawls, and nets;
It swallows them all,
Leaving but momentary ripples
Before closing itself up again, unblemished.
Streams flow to the sea
Merging with it, harmonizing,
As if obeying an everlasting covenant
To be one with the larger whole.
The sea speaks its own tongue,
Has its own language.
Without phonemes, morphemes, or syntax
It has no parts to be parsed,
Allows for no precise analysis.
It roars, bellows, mutters, whispers,
Mingling varied sounds into one ocean sound,
Asserting no meaning; a wordless song,
Weaving incantation.
True, we have made attempts to fracture the sea,
To create demarcations for our use
By naming the land beneath it:
Shoal Spot, Crumbles Ledge, Jacobs’s Ground.
But it cannot be transformed into real estate.
When anchor is raised
No sign of ownership remains.
It resists divisions;
It will not be denied its wholeness
For all our naming.
Birds and Dolphins
Just off shore the birds were waiting,
Gulls, gannets, kittiwakes and shearwaters
Resting, rocking on the yeasty waves,
Diving for caplin rousted by dolphins.
Quietly we eased the boat among them,
Scattering them, screeching, cooing, braying,
Into the wind, disappearing
As if the air had opened and let them in.
Dolphins, Sleek, black, shining,
Reeled as if to lead us,
Leaping, hurtling, dancing,
Churning the sea
Like a tumult of wind,
Filling the air with their wild ecstasies,
Seemingly lost in the splendour of the moment,
As if they knew that life was sweet,
And summer sunshine beautiful.
I was suddenly awakened into the world’s sharp beauty,
Exquisite, transcendent.
Somehow the splendour lingered,
Transforming the evening meal into sacrament.
Come Close, My Love
We moved all in a rush through quickening spring,
With its
Buds bursting,
Robins chirping,
Brooks babbling,
Lambs bounding;
And rushed heedlessly
Into the yellow days of summer,
Days long and languid,
Bees humming,
Grass, tall, silken, undulating;
Buttercups dancing,
Aspen leaves rustling, whispering
In the warm breeze.
We acted as if summer were but
A maturing spring,
And autumn discontinued.
Suddenly the icy October wind
Strewed summer’s frail flowers,
And scattered the yellowing leaves
While the cold rain plastered them,
Black and limp, to the soggy ground;
And the frigid night-gales
Lashed the aged, naked birch,
Against the creaking window panes
All through the night.
We sit here now waiting for winter’s
Chill.
Come close my love,
Hold me,
Remind me again of
Spring.
A Bluebell
From whence comes wonderment and awe,
When a single bluebell is all I saw?
I Am Many Lives
I am many lives,
Their presence not always recognized;
But their habitation real,
Changing what I was.
Yet the essential me, enriched,
Abides.
Kauai’s Cliffs
From our moving ship I gaze upon lava rivers,
Congealed, forming pathways to the sea.
For centuries they lay
Baked brown in the hot sun.
Then they ripened into green,
Revealing their dark, deep-shadowed bottoms,
And their once sharp-ribbed banks,
Softened by dark lichen and green moss.
There’s been no ice gouging here,
Just a smooth flow of liquid fire
Cooling into a habitation for the human mind.
And the human mind
Sees more than dried rivers.
It sees nature’s artistry:
A cathedral adorned with
Towering spires,
Ribbed, exuberant, ornamental
Like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia
In Barcelona.
Surrounded by a green-stone forest
Standing against the sea and wind and rain,
An image of eternity.
And gigantic shadow figures
Gradually changing as we move,
Like ancient spirits
Hovering over he face of the cliffs
Surveying their handiwork.
And at the water’s edge
A stone leviathan
Like some guardian of the deep,
It’s ribbed back taut,
Frozen in an eternal crouch.
This haunting beauty,
A cataclysmic, spontaneous genesis
That surged, and rolled, and cascaded
From the heart of nature
As if it were suddenly
Liberated from its bondage.
