D.V. Cooke
Tristia
Dark sail in the night unfurling
Do not ask what sea or shanty shakes
Roughly over the shingle shifting...
Knowing and speaking too much of endless
Spawnings, the salmon sea lowers and rises.
Those syntax-eating multitudes whose
weightless
Counter-leap and sudden fall surprises -
Where on the coast at evening there might be
Pools where salt and passive waters would dry
And sift their essentialness. The closed sea
Proportioned where herring-gulls curl and cry.
Irony is not in it. Be oblique
Or persuasive but wrestle down the year.
Make mockery of all that achieved technique
Between the ebb and naming of a fear.
That tiller-tacking one-style resisting used
By poets to tease their craft into a calm
And empty time, set keel to shingle, bruised
That shingle where a prow furrows its name.
The salmon falls dry to a waste.
The lame god has done his worst.
Day closes. Dreams of life fall through
And fast from the one tree forgetting,
And death, it is, flows wide into view.
Page(s) 36
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