My mother took the bag from its box— 
home to my father’s ashes for thirteen years— 
and poured its heft into a form she made  
on the potter’s wheel—a vase, damp and unfired. 
She pinched the rotating lip, and sealed the clay  
perfectly shut, a technique I haven’t yet mastered.

We planned to launch it like a football at low tide,  
but when we arrived, the beach was lined with people, 
and there was no subtle way for my brother to toss it out past  
the children kneeling in the surf, the surfers awaiting the break. 

To carry my father out, arm above my head, heavy with him— 
or hold him against my chest, side-stroking  
with one hand while the clay disintegrated into the water— 
I wasn’t dressed for it.

Instead, we dropped him in the water by the docks  
by the old Shrimp Shack, all 6’4” of him, 
and I watched the vessel slowly descend, a few bubbles  
emerging as if the last breath left in a dying lung.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

^{Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system. 
                    —Plato}

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night, granite and steel—
Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves— 
Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of the strings....

And through that cordage, threading with its call
One arc synoptic of all tides below—
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—
“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!” 
—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
So seven oceans answer from their dream.

And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars 
New octaves trestle the twin monoliths
Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
Two worlds of sleep ( O arching strands of song! )— 
Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.

Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime— 
Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—
Pick biting way up towering looms that press 
Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade
—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link
What cipher-script of time no traveller reads
But who, through smoking pyres of love and death, 
Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.

Like hails, farewells—up planet-sequined heights 
Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre: 
Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry
Of inchling æons silence rivets Troy. 
And you, aloft there—Jason! hesting Shout! 
Still wrapping harness to the swarming air! 
Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,
Beams yelling Æolus! splintered in the straits!

From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums, 
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare— 
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time 
Into what multitudinous Verb the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In rnyriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay! 
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm...!

We left the haven hanging in the night—
Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel. 
Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn—
Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel. 
And still the circular, indubitable frieze
Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave
To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—
The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits
The agile precincts of the lark’s return;
Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing
In single chrysalis the many twain,—
Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow
And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom— 
Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm 
As love strikes clear direction for the helm.

Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—
O River-throated—iridescently upborne 
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins; 
With white escarpments swinging into light, 
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields 
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou 
Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns
To wrapt inception and beatitude,— 
Always through blinding cables, to our joy, 
Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy: 
Always through spiring cordage, pyramids 
Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name 
Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends.

Migrations that must needs void memory,
Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—
Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.
Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,
O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—
Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold— 
( O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me ) 
Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,
Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star 
That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings, 
Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: 
—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, 
Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring 
The serpent with the eagle in the leaves...? 
Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
   In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
   I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
   Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
   In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
   My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
   And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
   In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
   Went envying her and me—
Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,
   In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
   Of those who were older than we—
   Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
   Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
   In her sepulchre there by the sea,
   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

The sandy spits, the shore-lock’d lakes, 
   Melt into open, moonlit sea; 
The soft Mediterranean breaks 
            At my feet, free. 

Dotting the fields of corn and vine 
   Like ghosts, the huge, gnarl’d olives stand;
Behind, that lovely mountain-line! 
            While by the strand 

Cette, with its glistening houses white, 
   Curves with the curving beach away
To where the lighthouse beacons bright 
            Far in the bay.

Ah, such a night, so soft, so lone, 
   So moonlit, saw me once of yore 
Wander unquiet, and my own
            Vext heart deplore! 

The murmur of this Midland deep 
   Is heard to-night around thy grave 
There where Gibraltar’s cannon’d steep
            O’erfrowns the wave. 

In cities should we English lie, 
   Where cries are rising ever new, 
And men’s incessant stream goes by;
            We who pursue 

Our business with unslackening stride, 
   Traverse in troops, with care-fill’d breast, 
The soft Mediterranean side, 
            The Nile, the East, 

And see all sights from pole to pole, 
   And glance, and nod, and bustle by; 
And never once possess our soul 
            Before we die. 

Not by those hoary Indian hills, 
   Not by this gracious Midland sea
Whose floor to-night sweet moonshine fills, 
            Should our graves be! 

Some sage, to whom the world was dead,
   And men were specks, and life a play;
Who made the roots of trees his bed, 
            And once a day 

With staff and gourd his way did bend
   To villages and homes of man, 
For food to keep him till he end 
            His mortal span, 

And the pure goal of Being reach;
   Grey-headed, wrinkled, clad in white, 
Without companion, without speech, 
            By day and night 

Pondering God’s mysteries untold,
   And tranquil as the glacier snows––
He by those Indian mountains old 
            Might well repose!

Some grey crusading knight austere 
   Who bore Saint Louis company 
And came home hurt to death and here 
            Landed to die;

Some youthful troubadour whose tongue 
   Fill’d Europe once with his love-pain, 
Who here outwearied sunk, and sung
            His dying strain;

Some girl who here from castle-bower,
   With furtive step and cheek of flame,
’Twixt myrtle-hedges all in flower 
            By moonlight came 

To meet her pirate-lover’s ship, 
   And from the wave-kiss’d marble stair 
Beckon’d him on, with quivering lip 
            And unbound hair, 

And lived some moons in happy trance, 
   Then learnt his death, and pined away––
Such by these waters of romance
            ’Twas meet to lay! 

But you––a grave for knight or sage, 
   Romantic, solitary, still, 
O spent ones of a work-day age!
            Befits you ill. 

So sang I; but the midnight breeze 
   Down to the brimm’d moon-charmed main
Comes softly through the olive-trees,
            And checks my strain. 

I think of her, whose gentle tongue 
   All plaint in her own cause controll’d;
Of thee I think, my brother! young 
            In heart, high-soul’d;

That comely face, that cluster’d brow,
   That cordial hand, that bearing free, 
I see them still, I see them now, 
            Shall always see! 

And what but gentleness untired, 
   And what but noble feeling warm, 
Wherever shown, howe’er attired, 
            Is grace, is charm?

What else is all these waters are, 
   What else is steep’d in lucid sheen,
What else is bright, what else is fair, 
            What else serene?

Mild o’er her grave, ye mountains, shine! 
   Gently by his, ye waters, glide! 
To that in you which is divine
            They were allied.