ocean

Reckoning

My thoughts adrift, my mind at sea
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
the shadowed edges capsize me
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
   mermaid siren selkie
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal

The voices of vast oceans crest
inside me, giving me no rest–
I try to keep the center line
but sink beneath the murky brine

The ropes entangle me, entwine
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
I cannot make my tides align
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
   mermaid siren selkie
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal

I try to keep the center line
while searching windward for a sign–
The dead zones keep engulfing me
I find no headway in this sea

At last I float and fight no more
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
Let moontides guide me to the shore
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal
   mermaid siren selkie
   hydra serpent kraken dragon narwhal

The NaPoWriMo prompt today was to write a sea shanty. I’ve used “Blood Red Roses” as my inspiration.

Bewilderment

I am floating face down in a horizonless body of water.  My eyes are open; I seem to be balanced in the center of a giant labyrinthine sphere.  Like an octopus, or a circular net with ends stretching down, down, beyond all comprehension.  Somehow I can breathe.

All the rootpaths below me are in constant motion.  I dive between, in the unfixed spaces that surround them.  I sense that they are hollow, that they lead somewhere, but I can’t locate the wormhole.  The orb turns, whorling, gathering me into its patterned dance.

I am nowhere in space in time.  I sit thousands of feet above the sea, star-covered, as I swim inside the ocean’s womb.  I don’t understand how to locate myself, how to divide the illusions until they reach zero.  The still point of what is and is not.  There.  Here?  Both.  And…

Merril provided this quote from May Sarton this week for dVerse prosery: “In space in time I sit thousands of feet above the sea” But as she pointed out, my prose is too much like poetry to really be prosery. I had a couple requests to leave the post up anyway, so I decided to put it back up.

dreaming is free (part 3)

My message from the Oracle. It made me think of two collages (based on a painting by Ilya Repin) I did for one of Jane’s long-ago prompts, but when I went searching I could only find one of them.

can you bring stars
to awaken my ghosts
into the eye of morning?

I am longing for magic sails
to open me out from myself
like a window of liquid time

so I can remember how the ocean
became unbroken—a healing breath
reborn—surrounded by salty air

Communion

She thinks of summer, the beach.  She remembers the full moon rising above the water and shining a path from horizon to sandy shore, like the deserted backroads of a lonely night.  She wonders if those drives are only memories of dreams, condensed into something far more infinite than the actual roads she may have once traveled.

Her boundaries seem to follow her everywhere.

She remembers sitting on the deck, looking up into all the places she will never visit in this body.  Her mind drifts with the rising and falling of dark waves.

What is never anyway to the ocean that rocks her, the heavens that reach out to her retrospectively from that vista imprinted on her mind?  It spirals her like a galaxy, coiling her longing into stars.

trails of sparkling dust–
secrets of ghost owls echo,
shadowing the moon

For earthweal, where Brendan has written about wild mind, the one that needs no device to set it free.

water and air

ocean riding sky–
waves rise untethered floating
entangled in clouds

For Ingrid’s concrete poetry prompt at dVerse. Like Ingrid, I’m usually abstract with my verse, so I’m not sure even this short verse meets the requirements. I didn’t use any of the forbidden words though.

The top collage was done for a collaboration with Marcy Erb in 2015. The beach sketch, which reminds me somewhat of those in my lost sketchbook from last summer, was done in 2016.

Souvenir

I could not
look at it from be
fore or aft
er, only
the angle of gone, dissolved,
empty, vanishing–

not just the
material thing
that had been
dispossessed,
but what it represented–
a piece of myself,

never to
be recovered–and
here I am
left watching,
clinging to impermanence
like water and wind

“The Kick-About prompt of souvenir seemed perfect: my daughter had given me a small sketchbook, and every day I sat on my beach chair with my feet in the waves doing a drawing, and then writing a haiku to accompany it.  The sketchbook would be my souvenir.

On the last day of my beach vacation the ocean was quite rough, due to Hurricane Henri passing by, so I sat far up on the sand, where only a small piece of a dying wave occasionally brushed my toes.  Holding my sketchbook up to let the watercolor pencil drawing dry I was suddenly totally upended by a rogue wave that covered me completely. I stood up, soaked, clutching my pencils in one hand, but watching my sketchbook being pulled under and out to sea. 

I will replay that image in my mind for a long time, maybe forever.

When I got home, I channeled my emotional turmoil into neocolors, drawing from memory the ocean that was now fixed in my mind.  The sketchbook drawings were so much more beautiful though.  At least that’s how I’ll always remember them.”

For dVerse, where Ingrid asks us to attempt “writing your way out of a place of pain“. I drew it first, then I wrote.

(re) corded

weaving light
waves that cross over
in curved lines,
waves that land
inside the pause of the edge,
waves that linger cusped–

a small piece
of time, and yet it
fills me up–
I balance,
holding on to tides synapsed
between spells and signs

Punu Ngura (Country with trees) 4, 2019 by Peter Mungkuri ...

Peter Mungkuri’s “Country with Trees”, above, is the current Kick-About prompt. The layering of the different elements got me thinking about an idea from Claudia McGill that I had copied and saved which I recently found when sorting out files.

She took a magazine and tore pages partially out to create a new layered collage-like image. I did not have any magazines with trees, but I have lots of surfing magazines I bought on eBay because they are full of images of sea and sky to use in collage. So I layered the ocean.

My poem is a shadorma quadrille for dVerse, using the word provided by Linda, linger.

shorebirds converge with the edge of the sea

moving the water
with my feet
I float on currents,
my shadow following
each intersection with light

not thinking
who or where
I am–
cocooned in myself
and threaded to the aliveness
of what passes me
passing

crossing waves tracks
of lines and circles
forming patterns–
greeting me meeting
myself, transiting

throwing time into the wind
and not waiting for it–
wandering
in place

Kim at dVerse asks us today to write a poem in the first person that compares some trait of ours with something animal. In addition, the title should be the animal thing,

the ancient shores of galaxies still call

printed geese 1s

I stand facing the ocean
tides of wing and air–
time fades into mystery,
emptied of illusions

sea sketch 2s

tides of wing and air
held in light–
emptied of illusions
I swim in dream languages

forms die s

held in light
horizon merges into skylandsea–
I swim in dream languages,
wordless songs that awaken stories

elaborate music s

 

horizon merges into skylandsea
consumed by rivers of stars–
wordless songs that awaken stories
mirrored in ethereal blue

ocean pencil drawing s

consumed by rivers of stars
time fades into mystery–
mirrored in ethereal blue
I stand facing the ocean

blue 2s

For earthweal, sacred (sea)scapes.  How many poems have I written about the sea?  As many as I have about birds and stars and moons.  This unrhymed pantoum contains lines from many of them.  The artwork is from my many previous ocean-themed posts as well.