The Dead Seal

              1

          Walking north along the point, I find a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh: My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.

          His head is arched back, the small eyes closed; the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at its edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal’s skin looks like an old over coat, scratched here and there — by sharp mussel shells maybe.

          I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries: Awaark! Awaark! Awaark! — like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me, I am terrified and leap back, though I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like and old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

               2

          The next day I go back to say goodbye. He’s dead now. But he’s not.  He’s a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more: each vertebra on the back under the coat is visible, shiny. He breathes in and out.

          A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me — the eyes slanted; the crown of his head looks like a boy’s leather jacket bending over some bicycycle bars. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes.

          Goodbye, brother, die in the sound of the waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your  race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on the land, so comfortable in the ocean. Be comfortable in death, then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don’t want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.

                   
    
Poems by William Witherup
  
     
October in Appalachia
 

  
  
Forgotten Inventors  
   
   
the turtle
is the architect
of all helmets
   
the jaybird
invented
the alarm clock

sea lions
designed
swim fins
  
mosquitoes
piloted the first
drill bits
  
bananas
engineered
raincoats
    
pickerel
pioneered
wetsuits
 
earthquakes
planned the first
jigsaw puzzle
 
elephants
modeled
the garden hose

   

Poems – Theodore Roethke

The Far Field

I        I dream of journeys repeatedly: Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long      peninsula, The road lined with snow-laden second growth, A fine dry snow ticking the windshield, Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic, And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror, The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble      of stone, Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut, Where the car stalls, Churning in a snowdrift Until the headlights darken.         II        At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower, Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert, Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse, Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump, Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken      machinery, – One learned of the eternal; And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by      rain and ground-beetles (I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin) And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run, Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers, Blasted to death by the night watchman. I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught      in the mower, My grief was not excessive. For to come upon warblers in early May Was to forget time and death: How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless      cloud, all one morning, And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from      the bird shapes, – Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, – Moving, elusive as fish, fearless, Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end      branches, Still for a moment, Then pitching away in half-flight, Lighter than finches, While the wrens bickered and sang in the      half-green hedgerows, And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in      the chicken-yard.–     Or to lie naked in sand, In the silted shallows of a slow river, Fingering a shell, Thinking: Once I was something like this, mindless, Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar; Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire; Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log, Believing: I’ll return again, As a snake or a raucous bird, Or, with luck, as a lion. I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow, The wheel turning away from itself, The sprawl of the wave, The on-coming water.           III     The river turns on itself, The tree retreats into its own shadow. I feel a weightless change, a moving forward As of water quickening before a narrowing channel When banks converge, and the wide river whitens; Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, – At first a swift rippling between rocks, Then a long running over flat stones Before descending to the alluvial plane, To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from      the elmtrees. The slightly trembling water Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays; And the crabs bask near the edge, The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and      bloodsuckers, – I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water.      I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.        IV    The lost self changes, Turning toward the sea, A sea-shape turning around, – An old man with his feet before the fire, In robes of green, in garments of adieu. A man faced with his own immensity Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire. The murmur of the absolute, the why Of being born falls on his naked ears. His spirit moves like monumental wind That gentles on a sunny blue plateau. He is the end of things, the final man.    All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope, A scent beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree : The pure serene of memory in one man, – A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world.

  

The Storm

1   Against the stone breakwater, Only an ominous lapping, While the wind whines overhead, Coming down from the mountain, Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces; A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping      of leaves, And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming      against the lamp pole.      Where have the people gone? There is one light on the mountain.               2    Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell, The waves not yet high, but even, Coming closer and closer upon each other; A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea, Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot, The wind from the sea and the wind from the      mountain contending, Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight      upward into the darkness.       A time to go home!– And a child’s dirty shift billows upward out of      an alley, A cat runs from the wind as we do, Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia, Where the heavy door unlocks, And our breath comes more easy– Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs      over us, over The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts,      beating The walls, the slatted windows, driving The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers      closer To their cards, their anisette.             3    We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress. We wait; we listen. The storm lulls off, then redoubles, Bending the trees half-way down to the ground, Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in       the orchard, Flattening the limber carnations.      A spider eases himself down from a swaying       light-bulb, Running over the coverlet, down under the      iron bedstead. Water roars into the cistern.       We lie closer on the gritty pillow, Breathing heavily, hoping– For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater, The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell, The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses, And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the      living pine-tree.

  

Night Journey

Now as the train bears west, Its rhythm rocks the earth, And from my Pullman berth I stare into the night While others take their rest. Bridges of iron lace, A suddenness of trees, A lap of mountain mist All cross my line of sight, Then a bleak wasted place, And a lake below my knees. Full on my neck I feel The straining at a curve; My muscles move with steel, I wake in every nerve. I watch a beacon swing From dark to blazing bright; We thunder through ravines And gullies washed with light. Beyond the mountain pass Mist deepens on the pane; We rush into a rain That rattles double glass. Wheels shake the roadbed stone, The pistons jerk and shove, I stay up half the night To see the land I love.

(from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-far-field/)

   

In A Dark Time 
   
  
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
    
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
    
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
    
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.       

Molesworth on the North American Sequence:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/american.htm

Theodore Roethke:
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

   
 

James Wright Online

  

A Blessing
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16944

Northern Pike
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15808

On the Skeleton of a Hound
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15817

Four Poems at UIUC
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/j_wright/online