AQUATIC To leave the image of scuttling off intact—it is this dispersion effect you came to know, and love. Some man’s flashlight sweeping over and back across the beach. A sanded dark centering on those floating, pointed stars. You think too much my mother says in summer. In spring my thinking turns to a garden where it runs out partially to sunlight and wind. I think of Abraham and that long walk to the mountain, his eyes set on the mountain for days. I think of a dark well protected by a large stone, the miracle of provision, the bread that started down as rain and turned to frost and saving dew. A glass of water alone is sometimes sweet as Wisdom. As though it could ever be afforded by the dry air and scorched angle of a secret sovereign good. I was drinking to the end of the glass, a shipwreck at bottom, or a ferry safely landing after days at sea. The hatch door opens. Out comes an outstretched hurl of wings, some bright contractions of scales. Out run the shaken, spotted pelts unloading, casting water beads and smaller rainbows where they go in sweeping bands of flood- lights, in shapes besides the leafing crowns of trees, finding a sea tossing its ever after inside you. It was a dream I had of water. Bottomless as space. And back on dry land, a tethering give and take. As Love is to Wisdom / Wisdom is to Love. As ghost crabs instantly scatter where flashlights stripe the sand, as tides are communicants of moon— as the Spirit moves in broad and sunken daylight I watch for but wouldn’t obstruct your semi- terrestrial hide and seek. It is the dream of light at the end of water. At home below the surface, it is the animal I lost sight of to remember how to be.
THE ANCHOR
Let me confess what I know of myself. Let me confess too what I do not know of
myself.
—Saint Augustine
The many links,
the weight descending
successively through water
ran beyond the sensible
depths of feeling. Rode
was what snaked from deck
to bed. Rode, what sailors called
the length of chain
forged to absorb a wild
weather load, spirited enough
to dampen the force of the ship’s
worst pitching and heeling.
I saw the waves were always there
to come over what’s under and newly
behind them. I felt the anchor as a ponderous
dart—an art of heading down and digging
in, of withstood frictions and faithful
staying put. As the philosopher said in her
reading of the Saint—Life is always
either no more or not yet. It helps to remember
the anchor’s even perdurance, to feel
how symmetrically its iron
weight is fluked.
Not everything is made to go
as directly, entirely, or intentionally
down. The snake is made to snake. A
brimstone butterfly is made
to fly off the wall and out of the
garden, to blend its wings with green
and yellow leaves, mimicking even
the small, brown blotches
of fungal sporulation. Here the anchor
snakes off into water, going only
as far as it can, as far as the
rode allows.
The ship anchors with stars. With stars,
and related shadows. Not everything
is made in memory’s image.
Still, the anchor flies
straight down as if knowing how
it’s made to go. The waves shine over
its flight. If the end
is heavy, it’s often beautifully
hidden. Like the brimstone butterfly
is hidden as leaves (as leaves
are somehow
hidden by their trees).
From the Author: These two poems come at the end of a new manuscript titled Even So. Saint Augustine (Confessions) and Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us) had put water and memory at play in my mind. Also, I was thinking about Vija Celmins’ “redescriptions” of ocean waves, the old story of Noah, and a webinar I had attended featuring geneticist Paul Nurse discussing his new book, What is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology. A brimstone butterfly, he said, is what lit his interest in science.
Sarah Gridley is the author of four books of poetry: Weather Eye Open; Green is the
Orator; Loom; and Insofar. She is in the second year of a master’s in Theological and
Religious Studies at John Carroll University.