Nobody in D. L. Emblen's "Hour for Decision" is ever named, and nothing is decided. The title promises a crisis, but what the poem delivers is a man at a pier rail looking at water. The gap between that title and that scene is where the poem lives. Whatever the decision is, the poem never says. What it shows instead is the act of looking, and it suggests that each person's looking is private, shaped by whatever he carries with him to the edge of the sea.
The central idea arrives in the opening line: "In his own half-hour on the pier / each man looks upon the sea's green back with his own eyes." The repeated "own" carries the argument. The sea is a single object, but it becomes many different things depending on who stands there. One man sees "knotted seaweed snarls"; another, "leaning harder on the rail," sees "streaming strands of mermaid hair." That small physical detail, the leaning, matters. Seeing the more beautiful thing seems to cost a little effort, a deeper commitment to the view. The poem is quietly suggesting that wonder is something we lean toward.
Emblen's list of what the sea can become moves between the ugly and the lovely, and often within a single image. "Foam spittle" is crude, almost disgusting, yet it is set directly beside "trains of old white lace / flowing back from the heads of breakers," a phrase with real elegance, the waves imagined as brides or ghosts of fashion. The glints of light appear twice over: first "like glass splinters whirling in a drain," a domestic, slightly sordid comparison, and then, in the same breath, "wriggling sea-sperm / writhing toward the loose and fecund sand of many beaches." The sea is garbage and bridal veil, drain and womb. The poem refuses to choose, and that refusal is part of its honesty. The sea, like a life, can be read as decay or as fertility, and often the same sparkle supports both readings.
Structurally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. Lines swell and shrink as the waves do: the long, trailing sentence of the first stanza, with its accumulating "or" clauses, mimics the way a gaze drifts from one possibility to the next, while short lines like "foam spittle," interrupt like a flicker of attention. The grammar is just as telling. Almost everything in the first stanza hangs from the single verb "looks," stretched across eleven lines, so that the reader feels the long, unhurried staring the poem describes. Sound does some of the work that rhyme usually would: the hissing sibilants of "spittle," "splinters," "sea-sperm," and later "hissing spray" give the passage the sound of surf itself.
The second stanza turns from what the men see to what the seeing does to them. "Each man quiets his own loneliness, / and shades his own eyes, / smiling or snarling." Here the poem's emotional center emerges. The pier is a place where people come with private troubles, and the sea gives them something large and indifferent to set those troubles against. The "smiling or snarling" echoes the earlier "seaweed snarls," so that the man's face and the water's surface mirror each other. He sees what he is.
Meanwhile the sea goes on with its work, untouched by anyone's mood: "tons of hissing spray feed mussels on the pilings, / colonies of tiny fish race wildly through the waves." Life is busy and unsentimental beneath the watchers. Then the final image: "dying suns glow briefly, / like old dreams, in the spreading ocean well." The reflected sunlight is a sunset, and the simile of "old dreams" suggests lost hopes fading as the day does. Notably, the poem ends not on resolution but on a glow that is already going out.
That, perhaps, is the poem's quiet answer to its own title. The hour for decision may simply be the hour we spend alone with something vast, deciding, without knowing it, what we will see in it, and so what we are.