Grandma's Poems

Ever since I learned about sea-level rise
I’ve been binge-watching the Atlantic Ocean
but nothing ever really happens. It goes up,
it goes down. Sometimes high tide
floods a section of the city, which is nice
for the street-sweepers and canoeists.

I am so used to thinking about myself
that it’s hard to understand the sea.
What use is singularity in imagining that
seamless, quicksilver commonwealth?

The ocean is liquid, like the mind, elastic
tides of consciousness flowing and probing,
interrogating whatever seeks to contain it.

Ice is like the body, scarred and fractured,
ordained to crack, diminish, melt away.

And the third form—fog on a window,
ghostly mist, the clouds
which adorn the sky in celestial vestments
we glimpse as gaudy rags at sunset—
what could it be but the soul?

We are liquid and we are solid, oceanic
matter cloaked in the garment of being.

As for the ocean: she is coming to collect us
and gather us back into herself, as when,
long ago, your mother picked you up early
from the nurse’s office at school,
and gave you a kiss, and put you to bed,
where you slept without a care in the world.

It dreams in the deepest sleep, it remembers the storm
       last month or it feels the far storm
Off Unalaska and the lash of the sea-rain.
It is never mournful but wise, and takes the magical
       misrule of the steep world
With strong tolerance, its depth is not moved
From where the green sun fails to where the thin red clay
       lies on the basalt
And there has never been light nor life.
The black crystal, the untroubled fountain, the roots of
       endurance.

                      Therefore I belted
The house and the tower and courtyard with stone,
And have planted the naked foreland with future forest
       toward noon and morning: for it told me,
The time I was gazing in the black crystal,
To be faithful in storm, patient of fools, tolerant of
       memories and the muttering prophets,
It is needful to have night in one’s body.