Red Marine

Red Marine

Red Marine

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.