Three Artifices

1. Greets the Sea

He was wild and ruffling his huge uncurried body and

lashing his great mane upon the sodden beach. He was

flinging his tousled hair upon the beach, tossing it back,

then flinging it forward upon the beach again. Shell and

weed were tangled in his hair.

Greeting him, I remembered him when I rode upon

him and lived upon his back. I remembered all my com-

rades who lived upon him and I spoke of them to him. But

he shuddered and hunched and humped, rumbling over

his deep floors, and threw his matted hair upon the beach.

I recalled to him his old witchcraft that made me and

many others his creatures; had, long ago, wound us about

each other, every day had bound us closer and closer. O

we were his artifice, as the waves, as the white rippled

ribs of sand where he plays his fingers. Do you think he

cared? Careless old Artificer, he went on weaving and

enchanting with sorcery and spell his nimble inimitable

artifices, and did not care but beat his head and hands upon

the sodden beach and flung his long white mane.

I remembered his agate moons, his stars his million

lanterns, and all his shining garments, green and azure

and onyx. But he sprayed out a glittering peacock tail of

beaded spangles that shattered and fell upon a slimegreen

rock pied by guano of gulls; and did not care.

ll. Discovers the Webs

Between the branches of small sea-lined trees in a grove

at the edge of the shore, spiders had strung whorls of webs

like a laundry of lace collars or a garland of lace valentines;

and they had laid a sparkling net over vines that hung in

the trees. The webs hung like silver necklaces; they were

looped like festoons, they whirled like white-silver wheels.

Yet in the center of each glittering artifice hung the hairy

terrible artificer, solitary in his own spittle. Do you think

he cared?

111. Walks the Beach at Morning

On the beach at morning in the spindrift were rubble

of human offal and the sea's vomit: cast-off condoms and

rusty beer cans, shards of bottles and fags of campfires,

sandwich paper and a thousand cigarette butts; the twined

and twisted ganglia of seaweed, broken sea tubers (and

occasionally a piece of skin from some seaplant, shaped

like the forefinger of a glove), an imperiled crab bubbling

purple in the sand beyond reach of the tide, his salvation;

and once a ruined fish, faded and swollen. Here and there

glimmered blue-viscid jellyfish, and empty mollusk shells

poised like stone wings of submerged insects.

The raking and the seining of the waves upon the beach

seemed to be the sea returning to its own vomit or picking

through the human garbage and gravel; and once it took

back for itself as a kind of gay scavenge a woman's drenched

red slipper. As if it cared!