"Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."
-Robert Frost
When the great shorelight flashed and expired
And failed to hail the ships in danger,
The jagged inlet rocks jabbed deadly daggers
Against the ship's sick and
meager timber,
Which tossed and flew against
The waves crashing in attack on each other
Like large, monstrous
figures
Divided by still larger figures
That produced still-
remaining shadows of fear.
The panicked men,
numbering few,
Heaved lost hopes overboard and
Screamed piercingly in dischordant panic
Against ink-black skies awash with dark waters
That floundered down upon the crew
In some dread
equation, fear plus terror,
That
factored out the jagged Scylla
And the whirling Charybdis,
But nonetheless
multiplied to naught.
Subtracted, one man, cast off board
Into the rapid maelstrom,
Was circled by sharks and eels and
Left to be swallowed, whale whole.
The distant
seer, atop the rocky cliffs
Spoke mumble terror-stricken soft
As he saw
fiery wings plunge dead into sea,
Through
mermaids slain upon the beach;
He said: Our ceremony of innocence
Is drowned.
What is the rite
Of purification? How shall it be done?
Love, to one another,
Let us be true.
The art is lonely, dear, is it not?
Won't you stay and talk awhile?
Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how do dead gardens grow?
How do you come and how do you go?
Have you heard these children's tales?
There was a man in our town, and he was wonderous wise:
He is dead and gone, dear lady, he is dead and gone.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Could not assemble him over again.
Swirling Viola twists and dips
Under the circled breaks of falling water,
Gasping, clawing, yearning for rescue.
To struggle hard against a current
And travel far across, never full arriving;
Then, in the moment, these waters are absent
And birthe a new land, green, breathing, alive.
The cup's holy nectar tastes clean and sweet
And sears the cheek with spirit and being.
Thickened, the ticking touch of time
Slows, soundless, as clouds slide sideways, sun's
Rays reach their raise and rain's razing rage unravels;
Quits; quietly quelling its quarrel, quenched
Partially; and pushing itself towards prism: people
Observe the omen opposite the ocean.
His hands, dirty from forty days,
Hold the clean, sweet bird,
And release her into the beat of dawn.
Water draining, and a sharp hope,
As the tides rise in an arch of colored promise,
To bloom the approaching lands into loving swoons of life.
-1997