Classic Poem

But it had a beat . A fixed rhythm.
Not one like music's exactly;
more like an immense crankshaft's
to whose humdrum thrust evey bulk-
head in a ship shudders
as a sea heaves the screws clear.

Like that, like feeling a moment
whatever engines those are,
fired by hell's boilers four thousand
miles down, driving us, dragging
a wild skiff of a moon. . . . Some sudden
tsunami in time, or a " gravity-wave"
warping us bows-under, foam
to the forehatches? Who knows? But
it's the beat, the measured beat
that talks to us. Lord, it's all
some of us understand, making —
well, if not music exactly —
the joint jump, the floor shimmy. . . . Praise

be, then, for that manifest
piston or heart or drum
or prosody in the bedrock
and roll of the world that only
whispered to us, spared us this time
the ultimate amplifier.