is a sea-kept child who lacks a nose I got

and fingers like mine and all I have.

And yet the sea-kept child knows more than

I do and sings secrets alien to me as light

to a nosing mole underground.

I understand this child as a yellow-belly

catfish in China understands peach pickers

at sunrise in September in a Michigan orchard.

“The power and lift of the sea

and the flame of the old earth fires under,

I sift their meanings of sand in my fingers.

I send out five sleepwalkers to find out who I am,

my name and number, where I came from,

and where I am going.

They go out, look, listen, wonder, and shoot a fire-white rocket across the night sky; the shot and the flare of the rocket dies to a whisper; and the night is the same as it always was.

They come back, my five sleepwalkers; they have an answer for me, they say; they tell me: Wait—the password all of them heard when the fire-white rocket shot across the sky and died to a whisper, the password is: Wait.

“I sit with five binoculars, amplifiers, spectroscopes

I sit looking through five windows, listening, tasting, smelling, touching

I sit counting five million smoke fogs.

Repeaters, repeaters, come back to my window-sills.

Some are pigeons coming to coo and coo and clean their tail feathers and look wise at me.

Some are pigeons coming with broken wings to die with pain in their eyes on my window-sills.

“I walk the high lash of the frozen storm line;

I sit down with my feet in a ten-mile gravel pit.

Here I ask why I am a bag of sea-water fastened

to a frame of bones put walking on land—here I

look at crawlers, crimson, spiders spotted with

purple spots on their heads, flinging silver nets,

two, four, six, against the sun.

Here I look two miles down to the ditch of the sea

and pick a winding ribbon, a river eater, a water

grinder; it is a runner sent to run by a stop-watch,

it is a wrecker on a rush job.”

(A bluejay blue

and a gray mouse gray

ran up the canyon walls.)

Battering rams, blind mules, mounted policemen,

trucks hauling caverns of granite, elephants

grappling gorillas in a death strangle, cathedrals,

arenas, platforms, somersaults of telescoped rail-

road train wrecks, exhausted egg heads, piles of

skulls, mountains of empty sockets, mummies of kings

and mobs, memories of work gangs and wrecking crews,

sobs of wind and water storms, all frozen and held

on paths leading on to spirals of new zigzags—

An arm-chair for a one-eyed giant;

two pine trees grow in the left arm of the chair;

a bluejay comes, sits, goes, comes again;

a bluejay shoots and twitters . . . out and across . . .

tumbled skyscrapers and wrecked battleships,

walls of crucifixions and wedding breakfasts;

ruin, ruin—a brute gnashed, dug, kept on—

kept on and quit: and this is It.