Stare at the Sea
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.
Alvin Feinman
Alvin Feinman was born on November 21, 1929, in the East New York area of Brooklyn, New York. The son of Litvak Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe before World War I, Feinman was the youngest of five siblings and the only boy. Feinman graduated in 1951 with a BA in philosophy from Brooklyn College.