Classic Poem

The meaning of that movement must be found,
in the collapsing schema of red sails,
though it happened out there, in dwindling light,
upon the edge, half-seen, a mere detail.

More total, more for the body than the eye,
it turned dusk’s wind into a flapping hinge
while the gulls, alarmed, skimmed up across the bay,
suddenly caught in white again, wheeling

seawards, changing places in a relay,
until their veering made a dream of depth:
blind memory rising in a flickering wave.
(Its house is death. Its window is a hearth.)

It was as if, just then, a river shone,
as if, behind that wave, lost voices spoke —
voices heard after they had gone away.
The burden left is trivial, instant, black.

And yet you see that movement as it is,
crossing, like tide itself, through mobile space:
on the sea edge a sail topples, a red
tulip-flame twists in wind. The bright sea’s

glitter, with people bobbing in it, swallows it up
like interference blizzarding a screen.
There was a moment of cloud shadow, more
nostalgic than squint-eyed, orange sun

where fixed, half-noticed things remain as glints,
leaving behind them latency in time,
a spectral body stretched from shore to shore,
gulls in perspective, spindrifts of white sperm.

A sailboard’s red sail folds into the sea.
No substitute for fictions of a mind
which searches an exacter entity
in blind, green light over the harbour’s tomb.