The Atlantic
Sun-stippled and white day wavering, green and as gray
As fall noon, as glaring metal, surge and rupture and spray,
But deep, with life, with the war of it, all the history
Of slaughter and flight that quickened the forms of the sea
And showed their progenitor – I construe by the shore
As the bright-backed dolphins lunge at the light and soar
Through a trembling horizon, over a venerable ocean
That is volatile stasis, constancy of motion,
As the very first waters were, on the very first day,
When the very first dolphin in aching incipience lay,
A sacrament, a remnant of primacy,
A bridge extending from sand to eternity -
I would adore, but a legacy’s etched in the tide,
A legend of deep contention, of deicide,
Wound through the waves with relentless saline force,
And the pith of the continents terminating their course,
A terrible chronicle, the issue of chance,
Iconic violence, hallowed happenstance,
As prevalent and inexorable as the glare
Of this sun in its regnancy - always sensed, always there,
Thick, definite, oppressive in its light,
And always interposing between my sight
And the waters pristinity, revealing a path
Eroded into the current, a highway from wrath
And its perjured weapons, substance of a glittering span
Arching from fury, after the fury of man.
How did they see it, who, with the fire at their back
Came cutting the virgin swells, - the alarm and the wrack
That harried their homes, the monarch vengeful and cruel,
Considerate of doctrine only to bolster his rule?
How did they praise it, when with alien eyes
They watched from the gibbering coast, surveying the skies
And the waves that attained them, pondering what were the oaths
Compelled at unsaintly lips that were fearful yet loath,
What darts to the qualms of their kin, what swords for their friends,
What uses of justice roiled at its furthest ends?
It was honor and salvation, passage and depth,
Shark-keep, storm-range, voracious abyss, a breadth
Of wasting, of longing, of asperity in dying,
Forever proving their faith, forever belying,-
They could not stand at the doors, at the bars of its rage
And lift the lauds of the one who wrought like a mage
In aboriginal night, and set in place
Its arrogant undulations by his face,
Except that the past, like a film, like a ponderous crust
Encumbered their tongues with the memory of all they had lost
On that hopeful crossing, nor could they cup in their palms
Its ritual inundations, mouthing the psalms
That sung of the prime, but like a stone or a freight
It tasked the prayers of their fingers with a weight
Of princes and bishops and of their falsity,
Of pious pastors, of their malignancy,
Until each proclamation of the word
Resounded with protest and dissidence, with discord
Of heavenly resentment, with a cry
Against the reign of the powers of the sky
Who raised the legacy of force and sin
That screamed between their heart and its origin.
Their exile is mine, their flight, the separate prayer
Of this novel country, the same doom to be aware
Of what ungodly tongues have had care of our creed,
And when in my destitution, I ask for bread
It is hard to my teeth, and when I reach for wine
The chalice is clogged with the eternal dregs of time.
So now as I brook the unbalancing wash and roar
Of the waves in their tedium, I think, as I’ve thought before
When night was at hand, and the pole, and its meaningless course,
How kinder it were to vanish under its force,
To slip from a light that has no name to it,
No lineage, no patron, and to finally submit
In its making bowels to a blind unmaking power
Rather than stammer at this ineffable hour,
Rather than kneel in the ocean sealed with despair,
Devoid of a language even to voice my prayer –
But the waters, they speak, the foam, the waves as they spout,
Their crests break signifying, their crash cries out,
On my cheek, my limbs, on my flush inspirited skin,
Of the being they show, the being I move within,
Till their dousing’s a rapture in every heralded pore
That summons to stand disposed, to behold, to adore,
That washes to wakening, laves to a joy made aware,
And the word of their arcane disclosure, the word that lays bare,
Is not mine to begin, but grows like the resonance
Of a venerable but a vital jubilance
Swelling in chests – not mine – who were great in war,
In works, in fitness of worship, when they marveled before
The cognizance of their own embodied will –
Stone-sorted mystics, fed on the desert still;
Clerics cantankerous, jealous, keen to assail
For their ancient offices; soldiers sutured in mail
To vie with an army in chains for the right of their lord;
And always behind them, in them, speaking, the word,
The life, that in dying gave us the ocean again
And all it engenders, gave us the day, the sun,
That were otherwise lost to us, forfeit by a creation
At once a heritage and a separation,
Now salvaged, rescued, suffered to wax pristine,
By which the light is illumined, the waters washed clean.
And it’s by this lore – not mine – I am taught to pray,
To stand in the apperception of soul and the day,
And with a mind elated directly, say:
Holy, holy, forever perfect and holy,
In whom all goodness is manifest, to whom solely
All honor is due, all glory, who enchants the sea
And the light it reflects with an endless majesty,-
I praise, I bless, I glorify, I adore,
I fling out my spirit in gratitude, I pour
Out my sense in elation – all the waves and the sand
Effuse with the inexhaustible gift of your hand,
Who made, and remade, them all so that nothing could sever
Our souls from the ground of your presence, forever and ever.