for Catherine
You keep returning to the sea as if you'd lost a bracelet
In the water, or some such valuable and peaceful thing.
It is part of the problem of being a girl, my mother
Always said, such possessions as become windows
And mirrors to call a woman back, to demand closing -
Or as Henry James said, for he was no mother,
As the picture is reality so the novel is history
And not as the poem is: a metaphor and closed thing.
Strange how I could never go back to that spit of sand,
The sea-warren of the Cunnigar, in Dungarvan Bay,
For I would never want to deconstruct what was
Never whole, what was tentative and poorly given;
What it was that I chased after among blue razor shells.
But I digress, for this is about you, returning late
In the summer to a wild and restless sea; it is you
Grown restless from inadequate sunshine, turning back
Like a pilgrim to inhale the iodine of the far West;
Going farther, as you must, to meet the sea half-way,
The sea in its life being more entrenched than us
And far more Flaubertian. So what of your bracelet,
Then, and where did that come from? Nothing but salt
At the very edge of summer before it flips away forever,
Salt and sand that makes a kind of mirror, nothing but salt
Is left on the hard pavement out of the sea and kelp too,
And its iodine; all strewn on the cold water. As you figure
And pick among things like a novelist, the tide bathes
Your whitened toes, it advances and recedes. My own
Beloved, the sea's droll pathos kisses you: it is your fable-
Spinner, giving us knowledge abundant and vicarious.