'Atolls a-tolling:' The American Carrier, the USS Enterprise, under attack in the battle of Guadalcanal, the Solomon Islands, 1942.
218.
To land! To land was all that mattered!
‘You see her, Tug? That brief expanse
of bronzy rock that seems to dance
upon the sea?’
Tug’s engine clattered
wistfully as we both spied
ahead; and watched my island ride
the waves – a small, enchanted saddle
strapped to bucking Neptune’s back;
and me, rough-rider, keen to straddle
her and break her in. Attack!
Attack! Tug’s engine revved, then roared;
and sent a shudder through the boards
beneath my feet; as I stood quaking
there, and felt her throttle shaking
219.
within my grip, a nervous partner,
a rapid step, an empty floor,
a final dervish dance before
carnassial rocks would rip apart her
flesh and mine. But straight we sped,
my island pitching less, more spread
across as we grew nearer.
I tell you, reader, we never see
life’s true dimensions clearer
– a sudden sense of symmetry;
an end to mirror the start – as when
our minds, at last, can comprehend
the time and place of our conclusion.
The vividness of life’s illusion!
220.
The sudden poignancy of every
moment, the way each tiny part’s
a perfect fit, just as great art
appears extempore, a random reverie,
when, in truth, it’s neatly planned;
and O, to glimpse the artist’s hand,
its careful, loving intervention
is the essence that defines
a genius! (And not that foul contention
made by preachers who opine
the hand’s divine, and much too strong
to be critiqued, or proven wrong.)
We do not mourn our death. The grieving
which occurs when we, perceiving
221.
all at once the sharp, meticulous
details of life, and how they all,
those trillion puzzle pieces, fall
in place the moment our ridiculous
end is reached – that grieving’s meant
not for ourselves. No. We lament
the waste of so much concentration
by our honest maker. We mourn
this artist’s sense of desolation;
the pain through which our world is born
and raised. The mighty precision! It’s clear,
so clear to one near death: the sheer
artistic effort! The more enchanted
is life, the more we take it for granted.
222.
The wind tried hard to hold me back; it
madly wiped my tears and filled
my ears with caution – ‘You’ll be killed!’ –
and made a mainsail of my jacket,
which spasmed, crackled, slapped my face
with its loose collar. That airy embrace
was steady, strong, but lacked the muscular
pluck of swarthy Tug, who rammed
me through each wave in that crepuscular
spread of sparkling violet jam.
How thick a sea can seem to one
whose journey – whose life – is almost done;
how far each wave, how long each second,
when one’s demise is finally reckoned!
Japanese 'Kate' drops a torpedo on the USS Carrier Hornet in the battle of Guadalcanal.
And as my Tug reached full velocity;
then my isle began to charge,
a monster baring blackish, large
and drool-smeared teeth, with a ferocity
never had I fathomed of
that fledgling land for which such love
I held. The island rushed right at us.
I heard what sounded like a case
of stomach gas, a rumble of flatus
rippling through Tug’s belly. I braced
against the portside rail with hands
that didn’t let go when we struck land.
And what a blow! As if the ocean
could not bear our ship’s commotion
224.
and wished to smash us into pieces
just to stop our god-awful drone.
Imagine water turned to stone,
or newborn lamb whose fleece is
suddenly changed to armor plate
– that’s how it was. Our hurling weight
from softest substance smacked that lithic,
steadfast island with a boom
unheard across the South Pacific
since Japan’s torpedoes doomed
the Hornet and the Enterprise107
near islands named to honor a wise
Hebraic King! Atolls a-tolling!
Great moments in history are rarely consoling.
225.
What followed: A marvelous, crepitating
crunch; and then a cannonade
of sundry ware like grapeshot sprayed
into a foe – the navigating
gear, the kitchenette, a fridge,
straight through the window of the bridge;
the cabin detonated, spreaders
hurled ahead like monstrous spears,
a flurry of steel, as through a shredder,
wailed and whistled past my ears;
the radar vaulted from the ship
which left its steely chains to whip
about in wild, tentacular furry.
The rest, for me, is somewhat blurry.
226.
Until I found myself, still gripping
the rail, still prostrate on the deck,
still part of that spectacular wreck,
with bitter tasting liquid dripping
on my cheek (a mix of sea
and diesel fuel). Not far from me:
a large, much-dented brown container
which, a moment before, had lain
in Tug. The keel had split in twain her
hold, and there she rested, slain,
a disemboweled fish, or whale,
with box-shaped organs, steel entrails
all scattered around. The rocks were bleeding
her fuel. My mind, in sleep, receding. . .
107 The Hornet and the Enterprise were American aircraft carriers assigned to guard the sea approaches to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands during World War II. The Hornet still floated after receiving nine torpedoes and more than 400 rounds of shell fire from the destroyers Mustin and Anderson. The Enterprise proved equally indomitable, and although badly bombed by the Japanese in August and October, 1942, she still launched planes against enemy ships in November.
__________
Joan Didion
If the quality of poetry can be measured by the delight the poet takes in re-reading the lines long after their genesis, then I can confirm, my dear readers and critics, that these are some wonderful stanzas.
We lament / the waste of so much concentration / by our honest maker.
It strikes me that the narrator of my latest novel (a book now at the mercy of the publishing gods) says something similar as he observes a photo of his family just moments before attempting to shoot himself:
“A surge of grief — not for myself, or for my loss, but for the waste of so much love invested in the long creation of me.”
In Joyce’s “The Dead,” it’s not the dead that we lament. Death is courteous and dignified and refreshingly aloof to opinion polls or party gossip. We lament, rather, the little workings of life, the intricacies of creation, the passion and patience of the artist’s hand that plays a long-remembered song on the piano, or lays a table with “minsters of jelly,” “bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds,” “a small bowl full of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some celery stalks.”
(Joyce, by the way, places these celery stalks on the table to emphasize the bland, well-mannered, upright, overly-intellectual nature of his protagonist, Gabriel, “who never ate sweets.”).
These sweets, these dinner parties, these offerings on the table — however hard we try, we can never fully appreciate, or capture, or reciprocate for the wondrous workings of creation. What is more devastating than that?
Joan Didion expresses the unbearable anguish of this dilemma in her latest memoir, Blue Nights: “There was a period,” she writes, “a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently…during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementoes, their ‘things,’ their totems.” But ultimately these collections become the “the detritus of…misplaced belief,” serving “only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.”
Read from the beginning of Res Publica | Listen to the audio version (read by Stuart Devenie) | Buy a signed copy of the book
Add to: Facebook | Digg | Del.icio.us | Stumbleupon | Reddit | Blinklist | Twitter | Technorati | Newsvine
It’s bit like we were all mini-Ozymandiases, sure that somehow our creations (or re-creations, our memories) will last, where others have fallen. (A word in your Shelley-like ear…)
“If the quality of poetry can be measured by the delight the poet takes in re-reading the lines long after their genesis, then I can confirm, my dear readers and critics, that these are some wonderful stanzas.” And strangely enough for all your hubris I would have to agree
that’s some damn fine nice work 
Apart from my gratitude for your comments, sweets for a glutton of sweets, a quick reaction — “Ozymandias,” yes. Apropos for “the artist’s hand.”
Of the seven characters in “Ozymandias” — narrator, traveler, tyrant, artist (sculptor), poet, past reader of pedestal, present reader of poem (us) — you might say there’s an eighth character, or commonality, that survives them all: Passion.
Passion is literally embedded in the heart of “Ozymandias,” in those most bewitching central lines — lines 6 through 8 (See my comment on “Ozymandias” that appeared on a post by the beautiful poet, Helen Lowe). Here Shelley commits what’s known in linguistics as a “zero anaphora” — that is, the final pronoun is missing entirely. The actual meaning of line 8 is “the heart that fed [those passions].”
So ultimately the phrasing in line 8 is fractured and broken off — as with the statue itself (that missing “passion,” you might say, yet another broken penis from Time’s remorseless castration of Greek hero-statues). Such careful poetic structure — I mean, the mimicry between poem and subject — is an astonishing example of the artist’s hand.