on gleaming like desire in lovers’ eyes.
Painted pictures,
You celebrate conviviality,
The water of life,
Without which we should shrivel.
You bind worlds:
Lives acted on the stage of years
And the memory of lives acted on the stage of years.
Do not cease to quicken our hearts
Shells
Let us give thanks for shells.
Patterned cabins of calcium
fashioned into shallow cusps
or turned as on a potter’s wheel
into hollowed humps and whorls and spiraled cones—
O shells, you are shields,
shelters for soft-fleshed creatures,
homes of lime for modest mollusks,
functional, calcareous,
as strong as castle walls,
ornate as palaces.
You are ears that hear the sea,
sieves that sift the waves,
caverns where the wash of vast waters
sounds and echoes.
You are voices through which ocean speaks,
ventriloquists through whom breaking combers murmur.
Your lumpy ellipses are like planetary orbits,
your whorls like spiral galaxies,
your parabolas parables.
On your curved contours mountains gleam;
aurora borealis shimmers on your surfaces;
you carry cosmic dust on your rounded backs,
dark blobs floating on the effulgence of stars.
Time too dwells in your intimate forms.
You sleep in the tide pools of faraway summers,
on the rocks and beaches of forgotten shores.
Clams tell of children with toy shovels
running up and down wet sand, squealing;
whelks summon memories of lonely coves
strewn with the flotsam of creation,
and a boy walking thoughtfully
where the toppled waves rush up the sand hissing
and form patterns of foam that vanish quickly
as the spent waves withdraw;
mussels, massed on rocks like supplicants,
their twin shells lifted heavenward in prayer,
evoke the heavy middle passage,
the untidy, confused, occasionally glorious struggle,
the sea’s batter, the sea’s gifts,
the momentous daily rhythm of the tides;
and snails, stuck on walls or inching ever so slowly,
call up lazy August afternoons
in the company of family and friends,
when camaraderie has given savor to life
and the sea and salt and sun have drowned
the sometimes scarcely bearable burden of being.
In you, shells, as I gaze on you,
all of reality assembles
and is concentrated in forms.
You are tangible objects,
smooth, rough, prickly, pointed,
delicious under my fingers,
present now to me in time, yet timeless.
You are poems made of matter,
sonatas in lime:
I am your audience.
My own times and places are contained in your music,
as well as the eons of time and unimaginable spaces of being.
On you and in you,
in your tender beauty,
all God’s handiwork is mirrored;
as I consider you with love, carefully,
as I let my senses welcome you,
joy sweeps away all nagging sorrow
and floods the valley of my heart.
Ode to the Moon
That rock, the moon, is settled in the fork of an ancient oak tree
Like a stone in a sling
Waiting to be flung into the night;
Or yet like a ball in a goalie’s hands, ready
To be kicked downfield to the ring
Of pale stars hovering on the edge of light.
Unearthly, the globe becomes imagination’s playground
And changes into anything
At fancy’s nod: a round arena
Holding angel choirs, say, who, white-winged, sound
Notes from spheres unseen, echoing
The sun, as recordings of an opera
Carry voices of the original ensemble.
Like gauze, the praise floats white
On wood and field,
