Stare at the Sea

1929 –

2008

Stare at the sea, the sea is blind.
The sea gives back your theme—
The sea that is not like, that cannot lack
A thing
—you have heard this sea intoned
To every shock of chaos and of calm,
As though soul’s torn two intellects
Would marry in that hollow heave
The harm they cannot fatalize, the thing
A stonier dumb charm would weave
Out of its own locked raging tides:
The sea holds nothing it can hide.

Teach the sea to sing, the soul
To drink its own imagining.

Used with permission of Princeton University Press, from Corrupted into Song: The Complete Poems of Alvin Feinman, edited by Deborah Dorfman, 2016; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Stone Anatomies

We must be lost in stone
in water
into stone
be quenched
in fire, dissolved and stoned
in fire

We must be numbed
in stone
to wood, in wood’s
stone jelly boned
be whet
in air, in air’s fierce
drownings fired

Our beauties must be charred in wood
through stone, through cutting water
leafed

We must descend through stone’s
soft foot, through sear and atom honed

Alvin Feinman

2016

The Innocents

To forego the prodigy of verse
That each speaking thing
Might utter itself only,
Its hapless uncompounded sense.

That each air’s wand
In the element of its happening
Unawaitedly cover
And draw unmournably off:

That naming was the terrible power
Gathering the last
Against its time,
The Midas miracle.

Till the entrusted ones,
The obliterators,
Absolved their sentence also—
The salt of itself singing.

Alvin Feinman

2016

Day, Daylong

Day, daylong, how the soul goes staring
At its shoes, expanse that widens nakedly
To world
where each is poised
Assassin, suicide, to wrest
Redemption of the other in its choice: yours
The helpless span narration cannot close.

Route nor spectacle will not go blind
Nor bind their broken conscience to a page:
Learn to be No-one in the voice of none,
Friend in that friendless element forever
Unbegun, a sea, a body, a remorse—

Alvin Feinman

2016

Poems

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Stare at the Sea

More by this poet

Stone Anatomies

The Innocents

Day, Daylong

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