Marine Biology

Pretry for May 1950

VOL. LXXVI NO. 2

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RS

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three poems

MARINE BIOLOGY

Wie I came down in sallow winter time

To see this place, this rock-drop cauldron pot

Of sea-rage, watched the monster climb,

Bare his amber teeth and dash his face

On the arm of the cliff, sluice slot by slot

Down down and out, sucking, the backward race

A rout as fierce as the charge, I was so blind

What I now see in summer I could not-

Poseidon there in the sun-scaly sea tracking

The salty wind, his sea dogs leaping behind,

His bounding horses, the barking at his back.

Mere point of view, angle of eye-for see,

Now kneeling beside the summer's gray-green pool

That was so wild, what I choose to be

Is naturalist, not Hellenist out of hand.

This urchin flower closes to walnut spool,

Scared by my shadow. A sea-snail lost on land

Gravely pursues the water, his shadowy world

Like the Age's mind, cave-dark, twisted, cool,

How far from that sun-reeking spray-drenched god of the

seal

The javelin of my mind was ever hurled

At the Age's mind, the creatures of the sea.

Sea creatures, is it? We've our sea on land

That crawls and swims. I recognize

In the lab confines some creatures of the sand

And some of the middle sea. For example, the snail,

Peering from deep in his shell with recessed eyes,

Taking that view for the Cosmos in detail,

As holy whole, with humorless calm reserve.

That is Kershaw, distant-eyed and wise,

Who thinks from lab to cliff and back again

As though to impress the porpoise with his nerve,

His unity, his unintermitted brain.

Or the hermit crab, Johnston, stealing a coat,

An outworn shell, to cower in, disguised,

Anticipates our laughter in the throat

By asking who can ridicule a beast

That flits in shadow, vague, unrealized.

Geraldus and Nicolai, open at least,

Are octopus and shark and take their wish.

Geraldus squeezes slowly, unsurprised,

With equable arm. Nicolai gapes and grins,

Blinks his eyes, marks what is his fish,

And rushes and tears, ravenous, blinks his fins.

Viewed as a unit, we are all slaves of the sea.

Its intractability pushes us to despair.

Caught in its surge and tug and turbulency,

Its moment's repose and darkness, we protest,

But sway with its will. The tide now creeps up the stair,

Laps at my feet, the light tilts up from the west,

The water darkens, This is when I sense,

Despite my talk, the alien darkness there,

The sea-self. I fly to my sunswept dream,

The yelping water dogs, the mind immense,

Gold ocean for the sea-god and his team.