The Sea! The Sea!
Something stalked me, lunged for me out of the sea,
plunged me down to terror at five years old,
struck me rigid with fear from deep in the beast
seething there just The Sea! The Sea past that scorch of sand.
Mommy smiling—The sea! The sea!—and brother
running toward that stumbling, rolling hunger,
laughing;
fathers, children yelling with glee….
But something raged, madder, stronger than all
the games, the grins, the hugs, or home, or love.
At seven years, I suddenly lost that fear,
and the sea was merely the beach, and the biting sand
merely the stuff of shoveled tunnels, towers…
I wondered sometimes what had charmed away
that beast in the surge, leaving merely the waves,
merely the waters’ breath, the glittering dance
of sun on the sea’s palm, the laughing friends—
and ah! the birds, the gulls, their brave play
shaping the air, calling: Here! Higher!
Higher? Higher than what? I barely recalled
something below that lay there dark, dark—
perhaps the sheer staggering, breathing abyss,
or was it a shudder of power broke to my brain
out of the raw depths, lunged and crashed
on the undefending seething sand?
So large,
so large—that breath from the world’s abysmal well—
its wisdom drowned me in terror.
Perhaps depth,
depth alone—not that shattering surf
or the roar, the hiss—but the breathing night below,
felled me.
Decades later, I found that sea
and found it was myself.
How could I know
that all my country’s wind and stone are just
a contrivance of sea-wrack, tide assembled,
lifting, shaping that island that I call me,
that we call us, so that his little life,
this floating island, seems indeed a world.
