What Moon (2002)

Poet of surfside washes,
some moon hauls these words
in its brute train—silver
brother of the savage day, pale fire
soaked in dark—Yet this moon
is both track and tide,
its feral countenance
hanging over the wash
like a maddened bear.
For days I sit here mute
and stretched, whispering
banalities and tripe
for the mere discipline of it,
pouring the same glass of
sea-water all the way down
a numbed beach.
On those days I’m empty
and despairingly minor;
then something shifts or
aligns—mind to God,
balls to tongue, word to world,
heart to heat‚ I don’t know—
but look out!
The lines now hurl and nail
in a blanketing surge.
I mark these rhythms
weekly, some times in days:
for the past two or three years,
I’ve been in a general hard
tide of making which makes
of revision sadly incomplete;
I can’t slow down to work
and rework one poem, not
with this next salt breaker
foaming across the page.
Alignment seems the key,
though it’s also pure mystery,
since I’ll never know to what
allegiance I must swear.
There’s a feral moon
in every making,
a silver salt to tooth all
water back to brine.
I cannot know what
wakens here except
in glimmers and dark gleam;
the hour and day are no compass
for the track it scours;
my job is just to stand
faithfully on this beach
and sing how high the marges
reach. This page is my
hydrographer, a hand
ridden by the surly one
who writes the angry sea.