Current

Sush as you see
Such still you shall me find.
Philip Sidney

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In sight ahead, the sun and tide go down; retrospect, they rise.
Did Phaeton crash into the earth? Somehow carried
The scorching sky to fish and animal and human being.
It lies at feet, as broken noons and afternoons,
Before and after, times of speculation drawing live moons
Into dangerous waters. Some sages say watching crabs
In tidal pools can cure the sense of going astray.
The memory of leaning how to walk might even return,
Yet how long but the tide overwhelms you attending there?

The tide that flutes between neap tide’s shaggy rocks,
At spring tide past jetties topped with crowding birds;
Waters muddy or splendid, neither saving nor ruinous,
Themselves themselves arriving and departing, as in a bowl
Continually rocked where the pacing sun draws fish
Up and down its rim. No further thought could put
This better than the slow ceremony of jellyfish
Driven strike against debris or rock glowing along
Briefly current sparks according to the tilt.

All of which could only be known standing up. Given all
That’s build by force in discrete time, the cities and their people,
The tracts of thought and land, what currency drives
Along so fast that light in fearful light of day
Goes lost and reflection’s working everywhere –
Did Phaeton crash into earth? The city
On the horizon of the sea, its time and towers turned
To smoke spoiling out to sea, does it follow then: waters
Waste, invisible in white wind, waves futured

With sands of ruin, or are people still walking around?
Just this therefore:
When the sky’s a bucket of darkness, and night is packing
Tight with incoming tide, as dark approaches, swans swim up
The bay in water felted red and orange and oily with life,
Their closed beaks humming what they find themselves
Having to sing (no small matter mounts slowly up
Their throats). For those still afoot in the world,
Whose life is still in the knees, a song.