Salt Water, Perhaps Tears, Perhaps Poems

Thinking to have shorn through purple passage-ways

The swamped seas’ bucking and bellowing

In a heavy wind I came away at dawn,

I came away from sand and a kind

Of stone, kicked from the keel into a swollen sea

That conversely shaped me, while the white horizons gull-wheeled

With thousands of birds through tart, salty air.

All I have done since then has been to praise salt

And whistling water.

Birds I have never let rest, nor words (I fondly think):

One or two “shells” that seem to hold in themselves answers to quests.