Read an Excerpt
Sea Change
Poems
Sea Change
One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than
ever before in the recording
of such. Un-
natural says the news. Also the body says it. Which part of the body—I look
down, can
feel it, yes, don't know
where. Also submerging us,
making of the fields, the trees, a cast of characters in an
unnegotiable
drama, ordained, iron-gloom of low light, everything at once undoing
itself. Also sustained, as in a hatred of
a thought, or a vanity that comes upon one out of
nowhere & makes
one feel the mischief in faithfulness to an
idea. Everything unpreventable and excited like
mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future
takes shape
too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving
nothing in the way of
trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life, & it
fussing all over us, like a confinement gone
insane, blurring the feeling of
the state of
being. Which did exist just yesterday, calm and
true. Like the right to
privacy—how strange a feeling, here, the right—
consider your affliction says the
wind, do not plead ignorance, & farther and farther
away leaks the
past, much farther than it used to go, beating against the shutters I
have now fastened again, the huge mis-
understanding round me now so
still in
the center of this room, listening—oh,
these are not split decisions, everything
is in agreement, we set out willingly, & also knew to
play by rules, & if I say to you now
let'sgo
somewhere the thought won't outlast
the minute, here it is now, carrying its North
Atlantic windfall, hissing Consider
the body of the ocean which rises every instant into
me, & its
ancient e-
vaporation, & how it delivers itself
to me, how the world is our law, this indrifting of us
into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the
intermingling of us lacks in-
telligence, makes
reverberation, syllables untranscribable, in-clingings, & how wonder is also what
pours from us when, in the
coiling, at the very bottom of
the food
chain, sprung
from undercurrents, warming by 1 degree, the in-
dispensable
plankton is forced north now, & yet farther north,
spawning too late for the cod larvae hatch, such
that the hatch will not survive, nor the
species in the end, in the the right-now forever un-
interruptible slowing of the
gulf
stream, so that I, speaking in this wind today, out loud in it, to no one, am suddenly
aware
of having written my poems, I feel it in
my useless
hands, palms in my lap, & in my listening, & also the memory of a season at its
full, into which is spattered like a
silly cry this in-
cessant leaf-glittering, shadow-mad, all over
the lightshafts, the walls, the bent back ranks of trees
all stippled with these slivers of
light like
breaking grins—infinities of them—wriggling along the walls, over the
grasses—mouths
reaching into
other mouths—sucking out all the
air—huge breaths passing to and fro between the unkind blurrings—& quicken
me further says this new wind, &
according to thy
judgment, &
I am inclining my heart towards the end,
I cannot fail, this Saturday, early pm, hurling myself,
wiry furies riding my many backs, against your foundations and your
best young
tree, which you have come outside to stake again, & the loose stones in the sill.
Sea Change
Poems. Copyright © by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
