The Sea at
Rockaway
I
You have not practiced this art
In a long time,
And you’ve gotten sick
With the big words.
Find a fresh scene:
Say, on a beach,
With a pile of oysters
Bought
At a dollar a pound
Near the pine barrens of
Go out speaking loud
On the black-bottomed boat
Your friend’s grandfather’s brothers
Once used to catch lobster.
Speak
To the keel and hoist,
And speak as well
To the sea-witch who made
Salt for Popeye.
Shout
To seven seeps of light every third minute
Off the coast,
Waiting for the lighthouse
to respond.
Remember what ship, which course,
Cargo, weight, stowage, port, hours,
Because, captain, you have by this time
Drunk too much, and forgotten,
And you are just learning again
That shoals turn men into fish,
Fish into men,
That these courses are turning
By themselves, beyond your
hand.
And they are made of the ointments of
The sea, flesh sea,
breakers made of ooooom
And addled scents and the warm, womby
big breasted
Lashing of breakers, laying their mind to your own,
To lap kindred little smiles of the children in the
seaweed,
Who do not know the idea of undertow,
Sea greed to snatch back
At its birthright, remembering the foamy tomb, the
red-eyed
Sentinel crab nipping under the sand,
The hair combed, you at origins, laughter, begun.
These forces, no doubting: spindling drip-jawed jingles
end,
Hard few cries begin at the beginning
When man first stepped from water
Was the same moment he fell from the trees,
But the almighty Tick spins his jimmying pincer,
And upon the beach, four feet of shark and all eye,
We pulled him up to the dunes kicking, late at
night,
Smoking ‘neath
a blanket in March.
He told us the long death of the gills,
Kick of the genius sea.
Breaks land and mistletoe and all seasons’ kissing
and minor song,
Kicks the fast kiss, jeckles
the bracken hide,
Shimmies bindle-snap haunches, planted foot,
Land elbows, current like murderous boat-feed,
Bilge tanks of cholera, hepatitis, shingles of
Discarded, flag-wavers of
BE DROWNED!
I am in love with certain waves, crinkle-browed,
kingly, collapse
Shoddy hotels. Man and his girl rapturous
Try to sex in these waves,
you’ll insert brain for the bow,
The wave struts its
black-gold gusher
Crimsons your knee, mules you down, and the black cowl
Under wave after wave, be wave after wave,
Stipple the currency of men
With their short pockets,
That this gold beach (bronze only) be the treasures
Of yester-yore, and casual blankets in the beat
cleat sand
Wind the fester sheets of the dead.
II
I have only learned of late that all this praise
Makes the sun in a bad mood,
That Sun likes these sisters and brothers burnt,
That Sea and Sun are dreamers of the eternal
ounce-meat,
When all small tingling thoughts, the casual
carrying
Of pregnants who do not
know their insides,
When we, mood-eyed prancers
of selfishness
Nesting, get a swamp-luge
of sea as we sleep,
Sound out like snooty cherubs, Goddammit,
the tide’s come up!
And sea makes a royal fuss, lunges to the glands
And you are just learning again
That shoals turn men into fish,
Fish into men,
That these courses are turning
By themselves, beyond your
hand.
Have you ever seen them?
Sure: When
the laying lovers
Sleep like sloth, pearls, traffic moves a pin-eye,
They sleep,
But a wave, Slap!
A wave! Slap! Spans
Their spackled eyes. Sleepy? Get up!
Yer about to be drowned!
But they keep on sleeping, the water’s warm, and
this is
Nothing they never wanted. That’s why they’ve spent
All summer on the beach, rather than getting jobs.
III
I hear death by drowning is quite pleasurable; shall
do it sometime;
I hear seagulls don’t eat meat, except
proffered. I hear there
Are no vultures on the sea. I hear the lazy zones are a thousand feet
Under. I hear man knows only four thousand feet
below,
Which makes twenty-one
thousand he does not know.
And should not. For we have come this far in
Our molecular Bismarckian standoff, and even
Where treaties got too personal –
It should
be so with man: I feel a fat wave
licking at my shorts,
Could break my balls in half, could snap rippling
seeds to the urethral,
Finger my
eyelids till they are laugh permanent,
That is death, that is cornea made of silk,
Rum factories on the windward isle, shedding the
brew
Of self, finally, shedding self, guilt, the pining
for agency
And you are just learning again,
Once for all perhaps,
That shoals turn men into fish,
Fish into men,
That these courses are turning
By themselves, beyond your
hand.
-Christopher
Ketcham