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the clear gray icy water ... Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
PARTISAN REVIEW
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones .
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If
you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If
you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
What we have been offered, among other things, is the slow-motion
spectacle of a well-disciplined poetic imagination being tempted to
dare a big leap, hesitating, and then with powerful sureness actually
taking the leap. For about two-thirds of the poem the restraining,
self-abnegating, completely attentive manners of the writing keep us
alive to the surfaces of a world: the note is colloquial if tending
towards the finical, the scenery is chaste, beloved and ancestral.
Grandfather was here. Yet this old world is still being made new
again by the sequins of herring scales, the sprinkle of grass and the
small iridescent flies. Typically, detail by detail, by the layering of
one observation upon another, by readings taken at different levels
and from different angles, a world is brought into being. There is a
feeling of ordered scrutiny, of a securely positioned observer turning
a gaze now to the sea, now to the fish barrels, now to the old man.
And the voice that tells us about it all is self-possessed but not self–
centered, full of discreet and intelligent instruction, of the desire to
witness exactly. The voice is neither breathless nor detached; it is
thoroughly plenished, like the sea "swelling slowly as if considering
