Larry Eigner gives this poem no title, only a row of asterisks, and it begins the way a sudden noise does, without warning: "Sound and beat swell." Four heavy words, and we are already inside something that is growing. Nothing tells us who is listening or where, so the poem is less a story than a record of what it feels like to have a whole environment press in at once.
The first five lines turn that pressure into shapes. Sound becomes a "funnel of space / dragged in earth," a whirlpool pulling the air downward. "Planes eddy" is pleasantly ambiguous, since it could mean aircraft or flat surfaces swirling. "The shaking / cold" breaks across a line so that "shaking" hangs alone for a moment before it finds its noun. Then comes the strangest image: "fish jump the horizon." Fish belong to the water, and the horizon is the farthest line the eye can reach. To have one leap the other flattens distance, as if near and far were happening in the same instant.
The long middle section is a pile-up of nouns with almost no verbs: "slats factory colors," "a tower," "vast dome," "a dining car," "the girders truckload of stationwagons." The grammar loosens as the list grows. "There is a tower a / vast dome" ends a line on a dangling "a," pushing the eye down the page before the thought is complete, and "a sliding seats" doesn't quite agree with itself. The syntax seems to slip because the things arrive faster than sentences can hold them. One phrase works twice over: "we realize a finish." In a stretch about factory colors, "finish" suggests a painted surface, but it also suggests an ending. It is the poem's only "we," and the one moment of announced understanding. Yet the poem simply carries on, as if the ending were noticed and then left behind.
After that the poem thins out. "Or hens crated / traffic island" sets two images of confinement or stranding side by side. Then the language softens: "the oak starlight glimmering with flowers," with its liquid l's and gentle vowels, is the one line made entirely of natural, luminous things. It is followed by the poem's most hopeful sentence, "sometimes the sea does turn warmer." The small word "does" insists, as though answering a doubt, while "sometimes" keeps the claim modest. Warmth is possible, not promised.
The ending returns to hearing. "The gulf of ears engraved" echoes the opening "funnel," and "gulf" can mean both an inlet of the sea and an empty gap. The ear becomes a hollow that sound cuts a lasting mark into. Then the last two lines: "from everywhere / the dawning ends of the world." "Dawning ends" fuses beginning and ending in two words, and "everywhere" gives the poem no single viewpoint to stand on.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Rhythm comes from breath and from clusters of stressed words, and the white space on the page does the work of punctuation, which is almost entirely absent. The stanzas also contract, from nine lines to two, two, one, and two. The effect is like a noise dying away, or attention narrowing to a point.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it builds itself from perception rather than argument. Factory colors, girders, and station wagons sit beside oak, starlight, and the sea with no comment on which matters more, and the reader has to assemble the scene from fragments. Judging by the imagery, the poem suggests that a modern landscape of machines and travel is still part of the same living world as the tide and the flowers. Its hope is tentative but real: the sea sometimes warms, and the world's ends are also its dawns.