Celia, the Sea Does Not Remember You Waves are not waves But the convulsions of a body That has forgotten the bones it conceals. The sea a wound that refuses to close. Celia goes there because the sea soothes her. She goes there because the air cools her. She observes gannet and curlew As one watches The slow collapse of a star. A big black sea bird stands in the surf Like an officiating priest. Its eyes are two shells Filled with the residue of night. Around it, strands of t

Something Less Than Human I came, through sea waves, misty-brained, My love songs crumbling to shadows, And I was halved to something Less than human. How could I grow Into something more than what I had become? Impossible now, the diminishing returns Of what was given me at birth. Smaller than a baby now, more of a creature Belonging to the forests, of stumps And traps and blood, the day-moon Hanging over me like a sad reminder. I was lost, having become lost, and

Melville and the White Whale Shut up Here in This Caved Trunk of a Room, On the Massachusetts Side of a Loose-Fish Land We Call America — and Feeling All at Sea In a World That Is Mad and Wet All Over I Write down This, My Heathen Language. Making waves. Much INK OIL WAX SPERM BLOOD Spilled to find the White Whale — Whose mighty tail-flukes billow the sea’s shroud; whose peck-slaps flap and flood six hundred pages of Great American Prosody; whose massive genitalia rem

Image: 'A grey day on the Mersey' by Radarsmum67 (Wikimedia) Cast Iron Shore (the 'Cazzy') Where the river of tranquillity meets the lake of fire, There arises a bronze sea, from which headless Monsters of bad dreams emerge onto the Cast Iron Shore. Amazing how many broken ships run aground, all rusted And kelped by the red water. Saint Michael looks down, Amidst battlements and parapets, a sword in hand, ready to scrap.

From Creator to Creature After the birds and mammals lost their speech (the serpent's tongue having already turned to ash) and Heaven swayed and fell to within four miles of the earth, a disappointed God crept low into the sea’s womb, into Mary, our lady of the ocean, and transmuted his glory into the microscopic, a millimetre in size, living between grains of sand on the sea bed, eventually emerging in the form of a fish.

Credit: Ahmed Abdul Rahman The Octopus and the Fisherman A lobster paralysed by venom makes a fine meal for the octopus, whose cephalopod beak pierces clean the lobster’s shell, splitting carapace from meat. And still the sea sings with foamy lips. If startled by shark or stingray, the octopus vanishes like magic — a puff of ink, or into coral colours it contorts, bonelessly alien. Still the sea sings with foamy lips. The fisherm

Sea Song My thoughts turn to the sea: there the convolutions of time deliquesce into wavelike ease, closer to the rhythms of myself. It is where the gannet, the curlew are my fondest companions. Look: a black sea bird perhaps a Phalacrocorax carbo in a seashell of eyes on a coast of floating souls. Her dark echoes fade, fade into the furious light. O my Calypso, I am stuck from view, concealed by a magic sea. The sea moves in ancient gestures calling on the land to give

The Wreck (Boxing Day Tsunami, 2004) For the victims of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami Pieces of boat float on the water. A cargo of hands and heads go unrecognised. Camera crews walk on eggshell lives, pick up threads of stories. But tomorrow the photographs will start to fade as the world continues to churn in its grave.

Sailing to Bermuda (with Andrew Marvell) Selected images stand as themselves: not in a living but in an enamelled world -- Raymond Williams A godly remnant in an English boat on a mazy sea row to the new world with the old one in their laps. They sing songs of Eden replanted, of prelapsarian nights and greener days, of a milk and honeyed land where eternal spring enamels everything and the shores are slick with amber. Where lacquered melons fall at our feet, an