Crossing

ON the second day we scattered porpoises
into the light like horses leaping away
from a locomotive across their sleep and prairie.
On the third day nothing. On the fourth again

nothing to the horizon of nothing: clouds hanging
on the left of the sun, light spraying across the whitecaps,
the motion dizzy with itself in a lost eye:
the ocean has no sense of being looked at.

On the fifth day nothing again till ten when the swell
stippled bit by bit with jellyfish.
By noon they made a migration in the wave,
brown and velvet and seen in a wash of jade

when the waves tented and threw them against the light.
By five they were gone. Changelessly the sea
was empty again on the sixth day and the seventh.
On the eighth the gulls came. On the ninth, land.

That night my bed rocked on at the Algonquin,
my sleep swayed yet where the sea ran under it,
and the swell threw colors and lives away in the sun,
till I woke at last to balance and economy.

The next night even sleep had come ashore.