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Transfigurations
The Poet Who Mistook the Sea for a Mirror
Mitchell
LesCarbeau
Its sudden coldness shocks
and shakes out his words.
Thrashing and jostled
by foam and countercurrents,
he waits to feel the tingling
drift of deeper cold
at his feet, the slippery fish
and the rocks where whispers start:
the murmur of a sunken
effigy he takes for Art.
But the jellyfish moons
are ectoplasm, not metaphor.
The stings are real,
his tears indistinguishable
from the astringent salt.
And the waves' iambic smash
is not redemptive; not soul
but his arms are flogging
as he slides into the outwash—
and as he sinks
he is still listening
for the sea's poetry,
intimate but incomplete. He drifts
toward an exaggerated wordlessness.
~~~~~~~~
Mitchell LesCarbeau is professor and chair of English
at Green Mountain College, Poultney, Vermont, where poetry and environmental
literature are but the foremost of his wide-ranging interests. His
poetry has appeared in many journals and magazines, and his book The
Comedy of Memory was published in 2003 by BrickHouse Books. He
has won a number of awards for his poetry, including the Grolier Prize
in Poetry and the Discovery/The Nation Prize, and was a finalist for
the Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Competition.
His essay “End of Summer, Narragansett Bay” appeared in
the very first issue of Sea Stories, Vernal 2006.
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