Flounders

Was that a happy day? From Chatham

Down at the South end of the Cape, our map

Somebody’s optimistic assurance,

We set out to row. We got ourselves

Into mid-channel. The tide was flowing. We hung

Anchored. Northward-pulling, our baited leads

Bounced and bounced the bottom. For three hours –

Two or three sea-robins. Cruisers

Folded us under their bow-waves, we bobbed up,

Happy enough. But the wind

Smartened against us, and the tide turned, roughening,

Dragged seaward. We rowed. We rowed. We

Saw we weren’t going to make it. We turned,

Cutting downwind for the sand-bar, beached

And wondered what next. It was there

I found a horse-shoe crab’s carapace, perfect,

No bigger than a bee, in honey-pale cellophane.

No way back. But big, good America found us.

A power-boat and a pilot of no problems.

He roped our boat to his stern and with all his family

Slammed back across the channel into the wind,

The spray scything upwards, our boat behind

Twisting across the wake-boil – a hectic

Four or five minutes and he cast us off

In the lee of the land, but a mile or more

From our dock. We toiled along inshore. We came

To a back-channel, under beach-house gardens – marsh grass,

Wild, original greenery of America,

Mud-slicks and fiddler-crab warrens, as we groped

Towards the harbour. Gloom-rich water. Something

Suggested easy plenty. We lowered baits,

And out of about six feet of water

Six or seven feet from land, we pulled up flounders

Big as big plates, till all our bait had gone.

After our wind-burned, head-glitter day of emptiness,

And the slogging row for our lives, and the rescue,

Suddenly out of water easy as oil

The sea piled our boat with its surplus. And the day

Curled out of brilliant, arduous morning,

Through wind-hammered perilous afternoon,

Salt-scoured, to a storm-gold evening, a luxury

Of rowing among the dream-yachts of the rich

Lolling at anchor off the play-world pier.

How tiny an adventure

To stay so monumental in our marriage,

A slight ordeal of all that might be,

And a small thrill-breath of what many live by,

And a small prize, a toy miniature

Of the life that might have bonded us

Into a single animal, a single soul –

It was a visit from the goddess, the beauty

Who was poetry’s sister – she had come

To tell poetry she was spoiling us.

Poetry listened, maybe, but we heard nothing

And poetry did not tell us. And we

Only did what poetry told us to do.