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Stella Benson
There is the track my feet have worn
By which my fate may find me:
From that dim place where I was born
Those footprints run behind me.
Uncertain was the trail I left,
For--oh, the way was stormy;
But now this splendid sea has cleft
My journey from before me.
Three things the sea shall never end,
Three things shall mock its power:
My singing soul, my Secret Friend,
And this, my perfect hour.
And you shall seek me till you reach
The tangled tide advancing,
And you shall find upon the beach
The traces of my dancing,
the day is as long
as the way home
I hear a gull vomit
Among the cobbles of a shingle beach,
one thumb-sized stone draws
your beachcomber’s eye, too pure a blue
to be granite, opaque but somehow
promising translucence.
A wave clatters up & wets
your ankles. You grab for the stone,
now glistening—clearly glass
& once a shard, despite the loss
of all sharp edges &
its transformation from fragment
to a whole small world.
It has turned & turned in the bay’s
watery gullet, that precipitous gizzard
full of ersatz teeth.
What smaller, softer things
Different worlds,
Strange people.
Discovering more,
Delving deeper.
Exploring the corners,
Of my mind.
Searching for one thing,
That I can't find.
Faraway towers,
Beautiful rivers.
Happiness shown,
Only through mirrors.
Corpses begin,
To turn up on beaches.
Reminding me that,
I'm still only dreaming.
sunlight pours through the window and its bent blinds,
stabbing at my eyes until they're filled with swirls of red and orange.
the birds try their best to make blood pool from my ears.
No, I don't want to leave!
Please don't wake me up.
the world i've created, painstakingly crafted, dulls.
their voices are muddled as reality punches me in the gut.
What did they look like again?
a kaleidoscope dances behind my eyelids and
i pull the covers over my head.
We were at the beach. No, the park. And they were saying...
but then the dream disintegrates
and floats away in the wind.
it's all lost.
there's barely a footprint left to haunt my every memory.
"I had this dream earlier."
Jeffie with your house full of
cockroaches,
In the oven of your house by the sea,
We came - we came, ready for
refreshment,
To the creakings of your house -
To the mussles and sandcrabs on the
beach and in your drawers -
We came to you, in a rush off the
highway,
While you, calmly and pregnantly
cooked artichokes in the kitchen -
Then we all lay down together
Underneath the night sea wind
That played across our tired bodies
Like spanish moss.
Lest the spirit of wonder be lost
Go to the beach and behold the infinity of the sands,
Go to the library and consult the card catalogue and
behold the magnificent variety of books and periodicals.
Go to the Botanical Gardens and stare at the palm
trees.
Go to the aquarium and see the fish.
Go to work and behold the infinite nature of your tra-
vail.
Go to a cemetery and behold old tombstones.
You can't fool me, you have never lost the spirit of
wonder though perhaps I had and have now regained it from
you.
How to understand things you have names for?
Shot at on the beaches of Rhode Island.
Sounds upstairs, Ron's radio, door half open,
the woman in a window walking back and forth,
noise of the fireplace. Flies in the center of the
room, bare trees, houses on which earlier a man
in yellow slicker fixed an antenna, strong wind
and waves, a single pole in the bay.
Traces of heaven, lines of the earth.
It is harvest time in the teeming sea
And the surges labor tirelessly
Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam
They garner the harvest and carry it home,
Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat
As they strew it in windrows at our feet.
Slender strands like a whip lash, tear
At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair
And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps
All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps
Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow
From sunken glens where the sea things grow.
Eel grass rolled by the waves at play
In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;
Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:
And Irish moss with its mottled green
Know the meaning of
the dory-boatmens'
daily beaching
at full throttle,
risking all between
two waves.
White sand beaches.
A shadow
erasing your footsteps
before I could remember
your passage.
A hand stretches forth
to pull me
from my exile.
Names fade into one another
without time to become new.
Limestone buildings
hold your shadow
while I pass
erasing your memory.
Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.
Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;
And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,
In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.