Everything ocean related, with a special focus on scuba diving the rich coastal waters of Cape Town, South Africa.
Angel sharks are somewhat unprepossessing creatures. Read more about them here.
Wan oxymoron of a fish, dotted
dun and fledge winged, mud-feathered when
it glides through silt, by nature bottom fed.
Whoever named it named himself a man
of undisputed Christian eye,
who saw in mortal depths a guardian
and humblest trumpeter. God tongue to cry,
it haunts an earth too dread for dread-
filled man til rapture calls: Arise and fly.
The “derelict” he talks about is a shipwreck, now occupied by a shark.
A gleaming glassy ocean
Under a sky of grey;
A tide that dreams of motion,
Or moves, as the dead may;
A bird that dips and wavers
Over lone waters round,
Then with a cry that quavers
Is gone—a spectral sound.
The brown sad sea-weed drifting
Far from the land, and lost;
The faint warm fog unlifting,
The derelict long tossed,
But now at rest—though haunted
By the death-scenting shark,
Whose prey no more undaunted
Slips from it, spent and stark.
A poem from the author of Moby Dick. Quite overwrought, if you ask me – “charnel of maw” and “pale ravener”!
About the Shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat—
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
Pale ravener of horrible meat.
Only seagulls surround us
balanced
on their parameter of hunger,
and seals
who in their soft-body swim
roll onto the rocks
to stretch their skin
to infinite edges.
They lie about
like sleeping infants.
If there are sharks
they swim beneath sight.
The water
slides by undisturbed
and the cold sun slips
through a seam in the clouds.
Persistent wind
like a child’s wailing
cramps our fingers
intertwined like nest twigs.
The picnic, pocketed into parts,
will wait.
We will be as those seals,
full-fat on ocean air
and lying
beneath the cloud shift
until the tidemark
measures the horizon
and our huddled bodies
take the shape of stones.
This poem reminds me of my 15 month old nephew’s bath time antics. He also has bath sharks, but they are more often inside the ship that sails in his bath than swimming beneath it. Also, he bites them rather than the other way around. We’ll address those inaccuracies when he’s old enough to reason with.
Look at my knees,
That island rising from the steamy seas!
The candle’s a tall lightship; my two hands
Are boats and barges anchored to the sands,
With mighty cliffs all round;
They’re full of wine and riches from far lands….
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?
I can make caves,
By lifting up the island and huge waves
And storms, and then with head and ears well under
Blow bubbles with a monstrous roar like thunder,
A bull-of-Bashan sound.
The seas run high and the boats split asunder….
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?
The thin soap slips
And slithers like a shark under the ships.
My toes are on the soap-dish—that’s the effect
Of my huge storms; an iron steamer’s wrecked.
The soap slides round and round;
He’s biting the old sailors, I expect….
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?
This poem is also from Reunion by Fleda Brown.
Herons are bigger than egrets, though they have the same long legs. My father said one with an eight-foot wingspan flew over his boat. I would like to be shadowed by something that big. It would seem
like poetry, just out of reach, moving and making a bare flush of wings, and I would think of it long after, the way it was heading away from me. My longing would not be satisfied even if I could
grab its scrawny legs in my hand, even if it nuzzled up to me. I would be looking up the origin of heron with my free hand, and when I read Greek, to creak, and Old High German, to scream,
I would wait for it to begin, but it would not say anything to me in this boat which I am not in, but at my desk hoping for the heron, a big one, as I said, so I can say, “Wow, look at that!” as if I were
getting up a circus. Out there are herons white and blue, not really blue but smoky, with wings bigger than their bodies, dipping and standing motionless beside lakes and rivers. Out there are universes
expanding until the space between atoms is too far to do anyone any good. Thus, somewhere this minute one heron is calculating the distance between his beak and a fish, the way it shifts. It is
as if he travels in space until heron and fish are swallowed into each other. There is no heron at my desk. In fact, the absence of heron is how I would define my study: no heron on the ceiling,
no heron on the floor, no heron on the wall, so that of course I think of nothing but heron, how it floats its weight on one leg, for example, flying that way even when it’s not.
This is from an anthology called Reunion, by Fleda Brown.
March: nothing here but a blank tinker-toy city of docks,
and one revved-up loon piercing the watery center
with its sharp, ancient beak. All alone, it locks
and unlocks the depths. I remember to think how weird
for a bird to fly through water. Meanwhile, little pings,
mooring rings nudging shoulders with the pilings,
and I’m shifting foot-to-foot on the balcony, waiting
for the loon to show, wondering why it divides itself, how
it knows how. I wonder if it’s mocking me.
A fishing boat comes through. Red and blue
jackets emerge, attach tough lines. Way out, dashing
along: eight wild sails. If the sea were thrashing,
we’d be saved by that exclamatory wall of posts. It’s
all dangerous: water, air, these railings and thermal
doors. It’s a wonder anyone leaves the womb, that we haul
our sails up into this. Notice how far I’ve come, though—
I want credit, here—to swing this far out between one
thing and another. It’s hard, given my dumb,
uncontrollable impulse toward harbor. I like to go down
and pull the covers over, but here’s the loon again, rhyme
leaps up. It’s a radical world, a boat pitching around
at its lines, that one there cheerily named Lost Time.
Via Beach Chair Scientist. Fleda Brown is a contemporary American poet.
Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own
skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,
dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab
shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding
a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.
Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making
intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
Here’s another poem by Lilian Moore. Is the plastic sand pail really what you want for your own…?
Isn’t this beautiful, and simple? Via Beach Chair Scientist.
Until I saw the sea
I did not know
that wind
could wrinkle water so
I never knew
that sun
could splinter a whole sea of blue
nor
did I know before,
a sea breathes in and out
upon a shore
