The waters off beautiful Nauset
Were the ocean sun, the sea-poured crystal
Behind your efforts. They were your self’s cradle.
What happened to it all that winter you went
Into your snowed-on grave, in the Pennines?
It goes with me, your seer’s vision-stone.
Like a lucky stone, my unlucky stone.
I can look into it and still see
That salty globe of blue, its gull-sparkle,
Its path of surf-groomed sand
Roaming away north
Like the path of the Israelites
Under the hanging, arrested hollow of thunder
Into promise, and you walking it
Your sloped brown shoulders, your black swim-suit,
Towards that sea-lit sky.
Wherever you went
It was your periscope lens,
Between your earthenware earrings,
Behind your eye-brightness, so lucidly balanced,
Such a flawless crystal, so worshipped.
I still have it. I hold it –
‘The waters off beautiful Nauset’.
Your intact childhood, your Paradise
With its pre-Adamite horse-shoe crab in the shallows
As a guarantee, God’s own trademark.
I turn it, a prism, this way and that.
That way I see the filmy surf-wind flicker
Of your ecstasies, your visions in the crystal.
This way the irreparably-crushed lamp
In my crypt of dream, totally dark,
Under your gravestone.