Читать книгу Doubtful Harbor - Idris Anderson - Страница 16

Starfish at Pescadero

1

I thought I wanted an Eastern mind,

a void emptied out of meaning and sequence and emphasis,

but this river coming down for miles from the mountains

never empties entirely into the sea.

We are walking toward—what I don’t know,

something you want me to see.

An egret wades the reedy edges.

His yellow eye peers a long time at a shadow.

I’m fishing too, casting lines

how far into knowing?

We cannot keep as we are.

I want, I think, to be one of the fishermen,

leaving as we arrive. They are carrying out a long boat,

a thing of craft and labor, seams and joints perfectly fitted,

smoothed out and sealed up in amber coats of varnish,

the blond wood gleaming gold.

In a dream of a time when I was barely awake,

I have heard them stealthy in black light before dawn,

stirring the current, whispering, sounds that carry over water:

boat knock, fish rise.

To want and to want and not to have.

Water winks a widening ring. A marsh hawk

wheels over us—the white patch on its back

unmistakable—head up, heavy wings beating.

Has it noticed white cloud as it rises and rises?

The ocean’s not far, just over the dunes. It breathes

like a shell. Everything I know is tidal, temporary.

If this is the day. If this is the last day.

Will I ever want to know what I want to say?

Soft, soft, our footfall. Everything is so far: my camera

at the root of the tree where I left it, and you,

walking ahead of me, silent and still as a pond,

into which everything sinks.

2

Cliffs and coves are also gold, sandstone shaped

by oceanic motion. Tides and storms

carve the heaviest spaces of earth.

Rock shifts, sanddrifts mound or cave into

new rock pools, sea anemones open and close,

all life undulates fragility.

You find unfastened a purple-red starfish

washing in the tidal slip and lift it up for me.

Ink-red patterns in relief on its spiny back,

hieroglyphs, ancient inscriptions I decipher—lambda, lambda, lambda—

strings of Greek syllables I would sing for you

in an optative mood.

3

I have not loved you in all seasons, only this one,

summer turning gold into autumn

and the California coast stretches long as usual in a mist,

longer in a bright day like this one, water unfurling

like silk along chalk cliffs, sky and sea lapis,

a white edge curled farther North like fur.

Every line in the landscape is hard with clarity

and whatever this is

is hard with clarity.

Teach me. Tell me. I am listening

like a morning bird of the marshes

hidden among dry brown grasses.

You cannot see me loving you.

4

Several miles up San Gregorio Road

the strawberry man can’t read your T-shirt:

Fly fishing on the Rogue, you say.

Wild fishing, he says.

He counts coins in your hand,

his own hands small, root-gnarled, pig-knuckled.

We exchange looks as we walk

from the tin shed into

blue-big sky. Your hands dribble water from a green bottle

to clean the berries.

He’s watching us,

a scruple in his eye, a baffled or knowing

wonderment. I can’t say which.

By the sea again, heading south toward Pescadero,

I pass you a large red bead of a berry by the stem.

Stem and all, all at once

you take it in your mouth

from my fingers. I don’t know if I know what I mean

or if you do.

In a fog of yellow dust, I see again

the farm-grimed fingers of the knot-tight little man who,

from the grease-black engine of his truck,

looked up and touched

the tip of his hat.

5

I’m being silly on our walk up the beach.

A dry stalk of kelp my baseball bat, and here’s a baseball,

one flap undone, wet and wobbly in white air,

and a light bulb from a yacht offshore brassy in my mouth.

You take a photograph of me, with bulb, with ball, with bat,

ready to strike. Me on the beach at Pescadero,

I’m throwing the ball up for your photograph

to remember me.

6

I kneel by a tidal pool to unfasten a starfish,

points curled round the ragged end of black rock.

I claw at its edges. Water ripples light

around my cold fingers, prying the starfish,

Nothing loosens. The nail rips.

I suck thin blood clean from the wound

and see the starfish in my watery shadow,

its purple-red like the purple-red of our starfish,

but alive with a wild tenacity. It won’t let go

and will not float like the dead into my hand.

We will come again, you say, to Pescadero

and colors of the sea will be different,

new animals in old rock pools, seawinds pushing our hair.

Something like knowledge washes over us like a wave.