Don McKay
"We come from a hidden ocean, and go to an unknown ocean."
- Antonio Machado
Everything you think of has already happened
and been sung by the sea. We were hiking
along the coast, with the hush and boom of surf
in our ears, on a trail so wet it was mostly
washouts strung together, forcing us
to find fresh ways around, teetery
and nimble, until I thought, yes,
the real agenda of this so-called trail
is not to lead us through this sopping biomass
but into it, with the surf
as soundtrack. Everything you think, it sang
has already happened and been sung in long
confessional sighs and softly
crashing dactyls, wash, rinse,
wash, useless to resist. Each wave,
having travelled incognito through its ocean,
surges up to rush the rock, Homer was here, and perhish,
famous and forgotten. On the beach
the back-drag clicks the stones and pebbles
on each other, a death rattle that is somehow soothing, somehow
music, some drum kit from the far side of the blues
where loss begins to shuffle. It's O. K. to disappear. Off balance,
I'm trying to hop from stepping stone to stone
when I flash back forty years to my friend's
younger sister sitting in the boat,
trailing her fingers as we row out to the raft, how she gazes
pouring herself into water as its depth
pours into her. I remember
being embarassed she'd been caught out
having an inner life and rowed hard for the raft
where summer fun was waiting with its brawny cannonballs
and swan dives. I think each memory is lit
by its own small moon - a snowberry,
a mothball, a dime - which regulates its tides
and longings. Next time I am going to lift the oars
so we can watch the droplets fall back,
hidden ocean into unknown ocean,
while we drift. I will need a word
to float there, some empty blue-green bottle
that has lost its label. When we lose the trail entirely,
or its feeds us to the rain forest,
what will we be like? Probably not the Winter Wren,
whose impossible song is the biography of Buddha,
then Mary Shelley, then your no-good Uncle Ray.
Not the Cat-tail Moss
which hangs in drapes and furs the fallen logs in lavish
sixties shag. I think we come here so our words
can fail us, get humbled by the stones, drown,
be lost forever, then come back
as beach glass, polished and anonymous,
knowing everything. Knowing everything they
think of has already happened, everything they think of has
already happened and been sung, knowing
everything they think of has already happened and been sung,
in all its tongues and metres, and to no one,
by the sea.
