Of miles inland from tide
And memory bled white.
The ships a man has served
Claim like a rousing touch
Delicate on the nerve
And bursting sleep for a watch:
A vessel yearns to curve
Forever an arc too much,
And gives to a man no trust
In sleep rocked under the past:
War and watchtime thrust
Below the dark and cast
The civil man to his lust
And the lookout to his mast.
Isabella Gardner
THAT "CRANING OF THE NECK"
((The primary word is I-Thou. The
primary word I-Thou
~n
only be spok–
en with the whole being. The primary
word I-It can neuer be spoken with
the whole being."
-MARTIN BUBER
Birthdays from the ocean one desert April noon
I rode through the untouching and no-odored air
astride an english saddle on a western mare
through the resisting tow-colored grass and the dune–
less sand. Under me swam a stream strange in that dried
country. A "great blue heron" stood still in the tide–
less water and when I saw
him
there my heart daz–
zled. I whispered the mare to move quietly as
Indians move, I reined her with a catpaw hand
and my breathless feet crouched into the stirrups and
