A Poem

[rfmcdonald]

Heather Pyrcz, "Deep Seas"

My God! I hope that I never have to go
Voyaging anywhere over the sea in winter
SAPPHO

1.

Out beyond the Inside Passage, in open water
where one can not discern the sea

from the piercing, impenetrable dark,
a lanterned fleet of fishing boats

dories and trawlers no bigger than the shell of Venus
plunges, lolls, rolls out of sight

then up the fleet rises, a soprano's
wild arpeggio and breathless trill

In this deep dark sea, the improvising heart
must blindly learn its tempo and its pitch

wedded to vast mystery


2.

It frightens me, the sea
God, you are vast

a winter Nor'easter, breaking seas
a wave rears up, higher than the rest

a rogue--a wall two hundred nineteen feet,
a wave no one has ever seen and lived,

toppled by the moving air; a roaring Niagara
just wind and sea and a rogue wave breaking

a towering leviathan between you, me, our boat
and where we are and are not

Even on a calm day, the Bay with its bright flotilla
can summon terror


3.

Imagine being set adrift in the Atlantic,
at what point would you sense the immensity,

three thousand miles of water, knowing what inhabits
the sea--shelves, basins, rift valleys

What would you hear besides the lapping
against your body--you, a foreign object

in the everyday flow of complex patterns,
the ocean's ahuman concerto

Could one express a world, manage rogue waves,
hunt food, cultivate water gardens happily,

learn to love unstable ground, extol fluidity,
transparency, an ability to float through history

All adaptations are possible,
except the freezing solitude


4.

What made Hart Crane leap from his homecoming
Ship or Kees from the Golden Gate Bridge--

was it clarity born of travel and isolation,
a solitary journey over water

or is it something lonelier still
like Frank O'Hara's accident on Fire Island

Are they careless, the poets, of places not contained
by firewalls, jumping into the dark as if it were

a fiction, insisting on the impossibility of separateness


5.

We journey inward and outward, like the ebb and flow
of tides, we ride the flux of thought, image, memory

of the waking mind--the wave of consciousness,
Virginia's fish: a traveller who never arrives

Yet how close we stay to familiar shores
(lest in the midst of the deep sea, one finds oneself

unprepared to continue and unable to return)
bound by the incessant contours of the land

-- from Viaticum, published by Gaspereau Press, 2002, 81-85.

Section 2 of "Deep Seas" refers to Silver Donald Cameron's The Living Beach; Section 3 refers to Kafka's "Freezing Solitude"--the loneliness of the writer; Section 5 refers to Dante,Paradiso Canto No. 11, 31-33. (from notes, 91)