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The sea is in play.
What says it is north?
Plates of the mountains break down
in checkers and stains.
Their action is being
never quite there I d know
what is there
around which the sun could resolve
a phalarope s egg
that holds its salt gob for the savor.
What marks the end of the notching in.
Snags of their wool
in the sheaf-rock.
44
Red-Legged Kittiwake
1
Native it seems to no part
of the North American continent
but some islets off
the rugged scarps of the Aleutians
in the loose entablatured cliffs
among dwarf-willow tips.
Known if at all by its silhoue e
(we can know such things by their silhoue es)
the red-legged ki iwake
glimpsed in isolate parts of Oregon
California and southern Nevada
said to go silent in winter
sli ing through snow
the red-legged ki iwake.
2
The red of the red-legged ki iwake
of a kinship with black
solders across the ice-gaps.
Native in no real part
but its obdurate course the red-
legged ki iwake goes silent.
We can know still more by rips
through the weed.
Red-legged ki iwake
gone back in the brain toward
noise of the narrowing ship-lanes.
3
Silver bones of the wrist
in their riggings rotate.
Pulp of the madder-root
shocked in white alum then soaked
45
through the wool for the waistcoat.
The frigate sprays back gray rime
cuts through the ice-skirt
pursuing such things
to the knit of the nest.
4
Crowberry swollen with fog
lichen resist on the lowest
spokes of the spruce
red-legged ki iwake
native to no part
alone in its parts
5
Kelp closes up
where the bird has just been
6
The legs retract in the pan
of the tail near the crotch
against the streaked ruff
bits of the barbs in breakage
out in the vanes
tipped into place
leaf of the willow tipped into
its branch the tip but tip to its whole
7
So where does it go when gone.
The wake of the factory ships.
Its chevrons compound the steep bluffs
it makes itself into those ranks
like pistons or books.
Its numbers are known to be in decline.
Is red for the advent
of sex or something more plain.
46
8
The sea works its surface.
Notched and convex.
It gives up its force in forms it must make.
It has a grease shine.
It is where they go when gone isn t it
through the known parts
47
Excursion
A plinth-land of pinkish rock
feldspars, we were told, fixed in
with paler, blacker stone, back in the middle eon.
We drove to see the ocean from that ground
more pendant-blue, with more striation
way out off the high old rocks
flushed and shimmed, at the ends of their erosion
the ocean unlatching its wavelets
wave-bracelets unlinking against the coastline
going so far beyond color, the slab-land
bedded with bogs, with edge-tarns
catching up sun, lodged in the land
thrown back from its headlands.
A ba lement built of cut boulders.
A shield of larches, bristling.
We were there. The forms fell in.
Shelf-solid and slightly pitched in the plane
the roseate broken-off rocks, tooled or
near-structural, staved at the road s close curves
the things that were forms
unparceling themselves from their forms
the things that were thrown beneath form
all were the figured entrapped, mid-measure
cyclic, then strange.
We came down, wound down
to the slim beveled beach
slung with the flinting
gradations rust, grise-rouge, sloe-maroon
selvages of stones, split through, pared off
in cusps, or worn oval bolls,
notions, or shares.
48
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of the journals in which some
of these poems first appeared: the Canary, Chicago Review,
Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, jubilat, the Literary
Review, Underwood: A Broadside Anthology, Verse, Volt, and
1913: A Journal of Forms.
A selection of the poems was published by Sara Langworthy
in a limited edition titled Morpho Terrestre.
I am very grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for
its support while finishing this work.
Colophon
This book is typeset in Arno Pro, by Robert Slimbach, and
Quadraat, by Fred Smeijers, fonts based on humanist types
designed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The handmade paper that was scanned for the cover was made
at the University of Iowa Center for the Book from flax and
abaca fibers.
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