Our souls look upon the sea--each with a different sense of things. That sense depends on the stories we've been told--the hopes and the fears such tales leave inside of us. When one of our sons died beneath the ice of a river a few days before Christmas, his younger brother was beseiged with night terrors. I wrote the following poem for him.
Irreantum________________________________
The Hebrew thinks the sea a witch’s brew—
a liquid brine flooding the nasal passages
forcefully entering chambers it should not own.
He sees chaos in the crone’s stir of the spoon—
the maelstrom of that awful monster—death and hell.
But sit beside the Irish monk who sits on granite shores.
The waters that come to him—as if the voice of God—
embrace his broken body and release
the deeper, inward transits of his soul.
Put upon the silver skiff, he sails to Western Isles
listening to the hymnal waves—breathing in the windy tide.
If we choose to be a desert people
the deluge will disturb our dreams.
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