Sea hums steadily in windows
And I shell out a fortune for it.
But I pay no rent for sea-view.
May be, I have cousins by sea
Some recent dead ,some long.
The dads lived to die long ago.
Since men and fish lived to die,
We must all be cousins by sea.
When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.” Emily Dickinson 1862
Whatever she says of herself
We still believe she was she
Who made gorgeous things
A supposed person in dream
In between a dream running
It was in her sleep and mine.
Last midnight, a fire arose
But it is just midnight late.
As it happens in mid night
Dog barked, sea breathed
Back and forth, road away
And the pillow kept awake.
Sea stays awake through sleep
Of normal people who are nice.
It keeps a vigil through deaths
Of normal people who are nice.
Sea is as nice as normal people
But the sea’s time never comes.
You ask ,where do you live
And whether and if you do
On this beach is upheaval
Where I live by a big moon.
It seems a sea lives by me,
From my balcony in its rust.
You are Beauty, we Godhead.
Bodies are birds of a passage.
We had borrowed our bodies,
We return them to their dust.
We had worked them so long.
A lease over, we return them.
We live in the poets’ ignorance.
Poets shout an existence song
Like the beginning of a scream.
A midnight went wild by the sea
When the songs were sightless
And lacked a knowledge of sea.
Everyone’s kitchen is green.
Taste a bond of things alive.
On sea the creature is green
But a creature is soon dead,
Taste a bond of dead things
Of live crows with dead fish.
(reading a beautiful poem Cutting Greens by Lucille Clifton)
The sea offers no mirror image
But only death washed ashore
At night ,when it grows opaque,
Imponderable for the bird brain.
Crows eat turtle deaths off sea
Finding sea less imponderable.
Sparrows live off insect deaths
Finding grass more ponderable.
I have four more to my Bible life,
My springs less for more blooms.
The dogs may have four or more.
Tree was lovely at twenty of year,
And not less lovely at my seventy.
It is not that lovely at its seventy.
The Morning is Just a Dream 