This floating island seems a world—so loud
with grim play, with business, with distraction,
with seawalls bending against the sea, with plans,
with goals, appointments, deadlines, and with death—
this floating island holds us like a world.
But sometimes we slip down some tide-worn gap
in the nettled slopes that hem the shores, or tumble
past the firm well-ropes, past our plans,
below this island’s times and suns and walls—
then nothing holds us, nothing like a world,
only the vast brooding of that sea.
Immense those powers heaving below the surge
that sweeps us into a chamber of dreams a-swirl
with visions, gestures, hints—
a childhood face
long banished out of the cruel sun, a smile
that tilts the whole swollen sea with grief,
lovers touched and lost, forgotten laughter,
a glance, a voice—
they fill that frail chamber
hung like a scented fruit from the boughs of the sea.
And beyond the slow swells, the tide’s breath,
unfathomed choirs call from afar, chanting:
We are the song that sings you deeper still;
deep as our plunging, glimmering track.
We sound
—through ebb, through glittering flood, through flesh and fall,
through gulfs you will all descend and all transcend—
your limpid passage.
Sighing, the surf wheels,
lifts us, heaves us back to the reeling shore,
then seethes down and is gone.
We stumble up-land
cupping a star, a spark, the ghost of a spark,
a glint of water to wet the waiting roots
among these walls and days, among these plans,
this desperate haste bending against the sun,
these goals, appointments, deadlines, and this death
that holds our floating island like a world.
Although poetry is Paul Panish’s major form, he has had a varied writing career. His poetry has been published in literary journals, including Signal, The Formalist, War, Literature, and the Arts Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Raven’s Perch, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and others, going back to the 1960s.
