The Rememberer

Like a new life each newest day returns,

Says the rememberer.

Like a new life, but not my remembered' life,

Each newest day, in glow, tides and returns

To this brilliant bay.

The ferry opposes the tide. The past opposes

The present stimulus. The stimulant smell of coffee

Alerts me and it aches my memory.

Vibrato of recollection: bassoon in the tug-boat tone.

Waking I see my cellular city.

Here in my morning

My morning comes like caves of light connected

In chambered cloud.

Waking I hear each life take up its way

When Liberty the nursemaid, maid of morning,

Lifts infant day.

I see him burnish in her hand.

His face on fire grins on the broad Atlantic.

The light of his fleece and radiance on Gravesend.

Waking I see the Liberty lady lift him,

Straddle him on a fish, without a-do she gives him

Her palpitant reins of harbor blue and gold.

His hams and thighs are jolted as he rides,

Riding from Ambrose Channel, where waves are under-

rolled.

Our atheist Colossus strides beside him,

Laughing. Anyone would laugh to see him there,

A nursling astride, fresh from her gull-blanched arm,

Tn love with his iron nurse's hollow hair.

Waking I see the day that glides the wave.

I do not see my remembered, says the rememberer.

The rememberer says: If my remembered returned,

He would return as the home-sick do,

Dreaming of this cosmopolis

The dreams that turn the ship around

To Sandy Hook. Nativity's arm, thrown curving,

Makes our Navesink headland all maternal

Where the attitude of the city

Is a woman's, with hair of bur-oak,

Parsley on dune forehead,

Beach holly on her shoulders, at her hair.

Then, in the shine, the city might compare,

Gold and abstract, with Coney's summer girl

When she lives a life in stripes,

When sun through the boardwalk cracks

Makes every person candy blue and gold

Sucked in the sweet of August's hug and hold.

In the Narrows how her knees are mighty,

My remembered might be saying.

Fort and free-way are sharp in their clear.

Her flanks are glistened by the morning

Where the gulls are worked like spirits

Where the sea forgets his motion.

The comber never comes there;

Nor does my remembered come,

Says the rememberer.

Why is he absent?

Why, when this city, like a woman between her tasks,

Turns as she naps because he has not come?

Here she has her lucid windows. Here her changeful

Cirrus of a sea-wind goes dappling on her fire-escapes.

Here Europe's daughter sleeps. She yields her legend

When her unconscious motion unmasks her moving dream.

The dream that she was born

From the creased brow of a flying Florentine

That she swam for Atlantis

That she was mistaken for the sea cow

That she rose with a wave for flounce on this rich shore.

The vision that now, below her terraces,

Ships large as lions with funnel throats

Are pacified and tamed by this calm queen;

That her grapefruit shines on her breakfast napkin

While under the ferry the lustral sewage flows

Toward a scrubbed evening when stone shines like the rose.

Why is he absent?

Although the rememberer knows,

The voices that speak surprise him. "He can never,

"Never return now. He cannot reach these pilots

"That greet the milk and cellophane of the sea."

Who speaks as the ferry docks?

The stage is morning.

On docks without ships,

In lip-fingered silence,

These iron shapings

Forged for the hawsers

Are sleeping like suppliants.

They are crouched there in mourning.

Their heads are down

And their arms are folded

Under their heads

And over their knees,

Supple, catatone,

They were the ones on this stage

That suddenly cried: "He can never."

Quickly they rise.

Their iron flows to robing.

Distraught they pace and pivot.

Among the anchors, their inter-changing linkage

Dances a chain unchangeable

Beside the shifting sea,

The rememberer says: I hear these tellers.

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They are familiar forms and voices

That can dance and make their voices meet and cry.

They are my moody spirit that comes so quickly

As in Trinity churchyard, heaven's Plaza,

The pigeon falls and aims for crumbs

And makes around the spire his spiral turns

They are my moody spirit that comes so quickly

In the deep street beyond the ferry,

As the bird to the crumb on the stones in the yard by the

grass.

Waking I see the day that guides the wave.

I do not see my remembered, the rememberer says.