{"id":5541,"date":"2017-03-17T17:16:55","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T17:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=5541"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","slug":"a-deepening-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/a-deepening-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"A Deepening Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

EPIGRAPHS<\/h2>\n
\r\nSeas and seasons on the edge of wetness<\/em>\r\n\r\n\"Either you decide to stay in the shallow end \r\n... or you go out in the ocean.\"\r\n--Christopher Reeve\r\n\r\n                     .. all that we are\r\ndestined to know, that the water is cold\r\nand deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.\r\n~~Jim Harrison\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
TIDAL POOL
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nLook into the tidal pool that stands so small,\r\nLicked into existence by its ocean mother; \r\nLook how sea and sky can stand together \r\nIn the salt circumference of its circle. \r\n\r\nWhen at its edge and peering in, the dark \r\nFeels absolute.  But, with a little waiting there, \r\nWhat was all sky or night begins to clear.\r\n--Look, a starfish, beating like a heart! \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nI Am an Anemone
\n<\/h2>\n

\nA belated report from a seer of being
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
\nLiving with the sea and surf is every New Jerseyan’s native inheritance.  There’s a scrim of winning, of life triumphant, that inheres to such wild and wetted borderlands between the ocean and the dunes that no temporary imposition of boardwalk, beach badge, or scootered police force can ever fully erase.  Last year one of the big movies was The Martian, based on a sappy book and executed with boku budget and zero imagination.  Their Martian was a man stranded on the red planet, its only inhabitant.  Do you want to visit aliens?  See a consciousness estranged from our fingers and lungs?  Look no farther than under salt water.  Here are animals and plants endowed with an elemental difference from our landbound neighbors.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd there, of course, under the sea, we began our evolution to becoming the landlords of dry earth–prince of predators and queens of the eating regime of life.  At least, of life on land.  Is there another us still swallowed by the sea, still wrapped in a tube of fishy muscle and zooming through the blue?  Some watery mirrory reflection of the zest to know all and to impose ourselves on all that we humans have?\n<\/p>\n
\nWhen I watch a fish twitch at the end of my hook, its face all made at angles to reduce drag and be an engine in service of its Shopenhaur-like will-to-live, I see my own eye going from glassy to arid as it expends its final minutes on the grass.  We are efficient in our environment, and strangers elsewhere.  When we succeed in life or business beyond the home, after the lame dorm, strong in our suits and boardrooms, or ably outfitted with a plumber’s wrench and toolkit, it is the old world of going home for the holidays where we feel the most estranged from our daily selves.  It is there, among the cranberry sauces and filleted turkeys, that we gasp after the mastery the aquarium of work and our married lives provide.\n<\/p>\n
\nBut still we go home.  Still we outfit ourselves with our juvenile social graces, or a newfound awkward silence that puts parsecs between us and our siblings at the dinner table–the green skirts of the christmas tree feeling as alien now as once they were the epitome of comfort and safety.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd so, as a species, we are divers and explorers of our personal pasts, of our nations and tribes, of our civilizations, and even of our previous incarnations as beings zinging along under the sea.  It is to that cold water we return equipped with diving gear and lights brighter than sunshine, recording new home movies of the old kelp patch, weighted at the belt to keep us on our visit, the old family, finned and eely, nearly unrecognizable.\n<\/p>\n
\nI am an anemone–as good an underwater emblem for a writer as anything–a colorful eater of facts and dreams, a living sitter waving prayerful tentacles before this mixed magnificence given again and again until, finally, we start learning to see.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd to see, of course, we must first outfit our minds and hearts with open curiosity.  Not to know the answer that will be divulged.  Life is no simpering SAT test, but a real engagement with what is.  And whatever is, is us.\n<\/p>\n
\nFor this voyage, let us be in love with fins and sinuous things; with the starkly sharp urchins, the deep sulfur inhabitants of poisoned vents, the wild things that neither roar nor fly.  Let us be baptized in salt water, and raise our heads again from that furious, wet source of being that first broke us out of dim nothingness into suffering and ecstasy.\n<\/p>\n
\r\nGregg Glory\r\nFeburary 14th, 2016\r\n<\/pre>\n
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POEMS<\/h2>\n
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\n*** The Tide is Wide ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nVoyage off beneath the trees \r\nO'er the field's enchanted seas \r\nWhere the lilies are our sails \r\nAnd our sea-gulls, nightingales. \r\n~~James Whitcomb Riley \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nInto Morning’s Quiet Overcast I Looked
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nInto morning's quiet overcast I looked:\r\nI saw a great grey bleak of sea-borne seeming, \r\nA pewter-cold and winter-empty snowlight that shook \r\nInto a wide wayside ditch, that was left sullying  \r\nUntil the sun the somber doleful ocean overtook--\r\nBreaking light like a run of fishes surfacing. \r\nThen, every curve of every wave looked up, \r\nBrightness burned in every tilted cup, \r\nBrightness lifting where endless dim had been: \r\nBrightness, brightness in everything. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe September Bee
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAll along the machine-sweeper's leveled beach \r\nAs along a lolling dog's long tongue of sand, \r\nOr mile-long emory board of luminous grit, \r\nI scuffed barefooted, belated, half \r\nWorking on a late September tan. \r\n\r\nA bayberry bud which night had shut\r\nHeld tight to something undisclosed, \r\nSomething daylight's tapping hadn't resurrected, \r\nThat moved untouched in little starts and fits; \r\nI heard a dull interrogatory buzz--\r\n\r\nSomething of summer left unremembered  \r\nStirred inside the clenched flower-ball; \r\nSomething smaller than a bloom gone rigid. \r\nWhen I shook that something into my palm \r\nA something almost dead, almost golden rolled. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nOut in a Rowboat
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nOut in a rowboat above fluorescent bones of coral \r\nI saw a sunken world waver as I passed; \r\nRainbow fish and glimmering squid shone floral \r\nAs the beat of my oars broke the water's glass. \r\n\r\nI was the furthest thing imaginable to them: \r\nAn angel in the taunting surf with repeating wings--\r\nAs though I'd fallen bone-dry from desert heaven \r\nTo be a backlit stranger above their swimming. \r\n\r\nWhat they were to me, I hesitate to say. \r\nThe water that kept them, kept them estranged. \r\nWhat enters us truly comes from such a long way, \r\nWhat they were was what I could not name: \r\n\r\nDense urchins rolling dark along the sandy floor, \r\nAlive with needles as a knitting circle; \r\nSea-lilies waving at a beckoning shore; \r\nMy own long shadow waving as it wrinkles....\r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nPainting Seascapes
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThere are images and images in the shifting witness\r\nOf the sea, in all that wetness yet unanticipated-- \r\nShape on shape in pilings-on of whiteness \r\nThat heap rocks blank until no color taints. \r\n\r\nThe artist's canvas there is pure as grass \r\nThat grew in Eden before Eve had fainted-- \r\nSave when Noah set forth in dockless darkness \r\nAnd God's skies a single swipe of blackness painted.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nPugilist at Sea
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nUp over the side came arms of salt water to deride\r\nThe insolence of setting forth in so low a thing \r\nWhere green angry seas swell over-high,\r\nReady to swat what sculling flies try landing. \r\n\r\nAnd still the sailor tossed and tried, and still \r\nFound hard laughter in sails rabid winds unfurled-- \r\nHands at hips, his face swept wet against \r\nThe massed contempt of all that brawling swirl. \r\n\r\nThen night came round, and calm came round, \r\nAnd all the water round laid down a mirror  \r\nPearled only by his little boat, and the only sound \r\nWas himself cursing at the shrouds, as at prayer. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe Wounded Boat
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nComing in blind by feel and raw belief \r\nThrough a coral-crowded sound alone, \r\nSilence is no part of her who lays beneath\r\nThe grieving whitecaps of this skiff. \r\nShe is as a child's lone slapping moan, \r\nMore real for being an unseen reef \r\nPanicked hands must guess at through the foam \r\nOf moonless midnight--the only shore a brief \r\nInvisible applause of leaves that signals home. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe Happiness Mast
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe yawing mast above us is \r\nWhat happiness is within us. \r\nSee it leaning like a needle does \r\nTo touch the water as it sprays! \r\n\r\nSee it stiffen toward the skies \r\nAs if to find among those clouds \r\nGodhood's enigmatic prize. \r\nOf its own seeking it is proud! \r\n\r\nClimb some midnight with limber daring \r\nInto the crowsnest at the top. \r\nAnd there--for a moment's scaring-- \r\nFeel your breathing stop. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nBrevity Blesses
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nBrevity blesses \r\nBy the littleness of its \r\nHash of guesses. \r\n\r\n* \r\nA door ajar is more, in its intention, \r\nThan a thousand precepts' edification. \r\n\r\n* \r\nA limegreen wash of dawn, \r\nDaylight's eternal line of red \r\nBisecting sky and sea, \r\nAnd day and night--and me. \r\n\r\n* \r\nAll the limits of the lake's wide circle \r\nSink superseded by the circle of the sea. \r\nA headlight's preening lamp is little-- \r\nIs least--when turned to face immensity. \r\n\r\n* \r\nJoggers stamp past on the sandy path; \r\nYellow dogs follow them, oblivious; \r\nA startled bird;  a shaken branch and bush; \r\n--And then the windless returning hush. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nIdeas
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat was it that accidentally I'd thought? \r\nWhat, if anything, accidentally caught? \r\nWhatever came, whatsoever caught, \r\nI found I had to carry in mind alone. \r\nI had no other pocket it could call home. \r\n\r\nIdeas are a nothing that we always need. \r\nFor all earth's endowment of dirt, they are seeds \r\nLight as kelp-spore, a minute's freight that breeds \r\nAll we are into all of light we see, \r\nBreeding upward reach from dark inward need.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe Turnstile’s Lament
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe weak \u2018sweep, sweep' of marram grass \r\nIs enough to make me think of all who pass\r\n(Waltzing barefoot as they collect their badges) \r\nOut to the sighing surf, out to where they wade\r\nHalf-mermaid atop green waves for saddle,\r\nAnd all the sea a sweep of pasturage.\r\n\r\nI myself, a sweeper of the edgeless stage, \r\nTurn in the wind, and am turned again, \r\nMy own weak 'weep mocking as I turn in pain \r\nTo the beaten sound of wet sandgrains  \r\nWhere enfeebled night kneels and cloaks the day.\r\nAnd all must leave, but the grass and I must stay. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\n*** \u2018Come In, Come In’ ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIf we were the sea, we'd always be dancing... \r\nRhythm from beneath and a breath from above, \r\nFoam of all those stories rolling inside us at once.   \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nFamily Album
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThey were familiar things in familiar places, \r\nPhotos and postcards and long Xmas letters. \r\nNames known down the bones, houses called home, \r\nDogs who, when called, always came running. \r\nOld fishing spots that stayed shaded all afternoon, \r\nThat always walked catfish to the dinner table. \r\nNewspapers snapped back in Dad's wide lap, \r\nA porch hammock swung in summer-long napping. \r\nSkinned knees, a broken tooth, and brotherly love \r\nTied tight to small fists as red boxing gloves.... \r\nOr dawdling at funerals while Mother was crying \r\nAnd Dad and Uncle Jim both restlessly pacing, \r\nTying black ties that didn't really need tying. \r\nThey were familiar things in familiar places, \r\nFamiliar as pain in family faces.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\n\u2018Come In, Come In’
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe coming storm  \r\nWorks its shoreward will until we hear \r\nBands of tangled lightning sear \r\nAnd hurry near. \r\nAfternoon rain pats my doubled-over shoulder, warm, \r\nAnd lightly touches hands below rolled sleeves  \r\nAs if to say \u2018Come in, come in, \r\nBefore the last light dies,\r\nBefore final night arrives.' \r\n\r\nI leave trowel and pitchfork where they stick, \r\nOur acre subsumed in quick eclipse. \r\nSoon rain roars cold against an upturned cart-- \r\nHammerheaded darts \r\nThrown too hard to dodge or miss. \r\nAll that light allowed to be\r\nKept at bay is bearing down,\r\nThat kept at sea the sea\r\nThat's come knocking now.\r\nSoon lot, house, and all seem lost at sea, \r\nAn empty pilothouse surmounting a silver surge, \r\nBattered branch and clothesline whistling dirge \r\nFor all of me. \r\n\r\nMoonless windows moan and strain \r\nTo be let in, let in, \r\nTo not be witness to how outer storm and outer night \r\nBend low to blow out every light. \r\nCrouched in our basement hiding place, \r\nThrown shadows fasten cloaks around our heads \r\nCrowding eyes toward eyes. \u2018When all is done and said, \r\nThis is home, our home' we would doubtless insist \r\nIf pressed for definition of our case. \r\nCradled candles elongate cheek, chin and face \r\nFlickering underlit \r\nLike lightning in an uncertain fist. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe Driftwood Collector
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\r\nAll along the wind-honed blade of bay \r\nA nor'easter from upstate's conveying treasure \r\nWhere sand was warm enough to roll in yesterday \r\nAnd water peaceable, and sleep a pleasure. \r\n\r\nDriftwood's floating in from a near hurricane; \r\nOsiris limbs that have drifted for years \r\nHurry now to reassemble upon the plain: \r\nOne foot stomping, one arm swimming clear \r\n\r\nOf all the crosswash late-season storms impose \r\nTo lie in oafish somnolence on a beach, \r\nTurning up worn beards and weather-beaten noses \r\nLike trophies, themselves the prize they never poached. \r\n\r\nBefore I retired, there was a log all knew \r\nHad been doing a dead-man's float a hundred years \r\nPast the point--and if no wiser, no worse anyhow, \r\nAnd bears him up no less then his first year \r\n\r\nWhen death pushed him rootless water-ward \r\nAnd time drained his strength like an hourglass \r\nAnd left him grey, and more useless than a board, \r\nHissing where he is when the wind stiffens-- \r\n\r\nShould he ever drift to beach to my collector's luck, \r\nI'll lever him off, and paddle out upon his back. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nThe Surfers
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen I walk early, for hours and hours \r\n      Upon the beach alone, \r\nI watch my shadow shorten through the morn; \r\n      I throw a stone; \r\nI watch it skip at first, then sink and sink. \r\n\r\nSometimes a surfer, wet-suited in the dawn \r\n      And on his own, \r\nSits high upon a single wave unevenly alive \r\n      As if half-enthroned, \r\nThe sea all-colors under him, a swell of gasoline. \r\n\r\nThe breaker he rides in will be immense, a wall \r\n      As wide as eyes can go. \r\nIs it loneliness that has him paddle out \r\n      As far as he does? \r\nAlone myself, I ride my dryer hill.\r\n\r\n      I always wave hello. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nA Wordless Conch
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA wordless conch held at my ear \r\nWas a sea-snail's hollow caul; \r\nIt endlessly sighs of landless wastes, \r\nPulling air into its bowl. \r\n\r\nSmaller shells in double handfuls \r\nCome up in triumphant palms, \r\nA ladle dipped at elbows \r\nDripping from nature's cauldron.... \r\n\r\nHow many inching lives in shells \r\nHave footed home to death \r\nTo give our morning walk this beach-- \r\nAs grand a road as Rome's? \r\n\r\nEmptied of their residents \r\nThe little mausoleums arch, \r\nScalloped worn catacombs--\r\nFleshless in the flashing wash. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nPilings
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI'd thought to put my acre of ocean true, \r\nTo right-angle the waves with a path for shoes, \r\nA promenade for boatmen to steady ashore, \r\nTo find their way dry again, if lost before. \r\n\r\nThe pilings we pitted deep into grey sand \r\nAnd (aware of parables from the holy land) \r\nWe stayed that sand with marine cement. \r\n(Our pilings would not be wrenched from it.) \r\n\r\nFour-by-fours and long two-by-sixes next \r\nWere spun betwixt pilings to cast a rigid net \r\nTo keep the sway-boned sea from dancing past \r\nWhen hurricane or waterspout would come at last. \r\n\r\nI stood back from the work and declared it fit; \r\nLooped my floating hopes fast with rope to it; \r\nCracked my back and thought of no more than bed. \r\nThere I dreamed the years of use that lay ahead.... \r\n\r\nCame the storm, and stood the pitted pilings fast; \r\nThe boat by its noose was saved, swamped but clasped. \r\nThe beach itself was wooed away and hammered back-- \r\nAll I'd thought sure and trued was flat collapsed,\r\n\r\nNo more than piled sand and rope gone slack. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nWintering by the Atlantic
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\r\nA midnight ocean and a stippled snow\r\nGreyly perceived from a rail I know\r\nShared the grainy dark of here and nearer.\r\nWhat water was above me seemed uncertainer.\r\nWhat rolled in mist below rolled solider.\r\n\r\nAs snow and snow will in snowing meet,\r\nWhat slid down danced into a wild sleet\r\nAnd randomly clung, each to each, \r\nResisting ocean's disassembling touch           \r\nThat undoes the individual who falls\r\nAnd in that fall returns to ocean's all.\r\nI could not tell just what my seeing meant\r\nNor how long soundless darkness had been lent;\r\nThere was nothing there in what was of sky,\r\nNo help of light to help say why,\r\nOnly usurpation's snow-deadened hiss\r\nThat ended each self-formed singleness\r\nDistilled from upper vagueness and the cold.\r\n\r\nThey did not fall because they had been told.\r\nThey fell because there was nothing else to do\r\nBut fall, and this the ocean knew.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nFlotsam-Mood
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\r\nI hold myself treading mid-ocean mid-June, \r\nAlmost lost among soft flashes of lashless eyes,\r\nLoose ribbons of wrinkling waves that rise\r\nAnd through oscillation bend and bend\r\nAgain, ending even with where they began,\r\nMyself a pendulum to their motion\r\nOf living hill and sunset ocean--\r\nA golden head lolling in golden swells\r\nThat lap the iron tilt of buoy-bells\r\nSwinging ringing their unattended knells.\r\nBut who am I, in green abeyance held,\r\nAbsent village clock and cocooning field?\r\n\r\nFlotsam in the great swallower, I,\r\nA mote of bladdered seaweed beneath the sky\r\nFlow myself outflung over rippled sands,\r\nThemselves unrolling in a treeless land\r\nWhere nothing is and no thing walks \r\nBut scuttles on points and pincers in the dark;\r\nHere my bouyed bones must sink, and sink to stay,\r\nWhite as the flippant foam confused in play.\r\nLike a criss-cross flag I'm blown about--\r\nShoreward winds first draw me in, then point me out, \r\nUncertain to which country I am flown devout:\r\nOne horizon mesmerizes which creeps toward sea,\r\nThe opposite arc of cliff calls equally,\r\nMyself the pupil spot in horizon's round,\r\nA fleck of naught between deeps and ground.\r\nNot lost, unfound in all that swells surrounding.\r\n\r\nI float alone on the ocean's groaning--\r\nFrom fathoms down lifts a gaping sounding,\r\nAs if a whale's lung, mid-rib, were sawn\r\nInto a mouthless mouth too widely open,\r\nBlowing hair into eyes with rough inhuman shush.\r\nLipless lips purse: sighing prayer, giving curse.\r\nI know not which I'd rather hear in the hush\r\nAs wave berates wave in the subsuming wash....\r\nIf I address what holds me weightless,\r\nWith head and heart so nearly stateless,\r\nI can't be sworn for either evil or good\r\nAs original author of my flotsam-mood:\r\n\r\n\"O Swallower, belched blanched from what\r\nDepth beneath your cold swash and cut\r\nDo I rise, a bubble in blown glass cupped?\r\nWhat answer will you make, but swallow all\r\nTo that treeless dark where answers fall?\r\nYour great green page folds and unfolds on every side;\r\nOn every side you pulse; I am kissed, pressed--\r\nA shifty bookmark anchored in your aching wide:\r\nMarking what, beside what poignant passage placed?\r\n'Mid ocean's tassels tossed crest to crest\r\nBy your wrestler's wet, intensive tenderness,\r\nI stretch spreadeagled as blank bells confess-- \r\nUnsure of outcome but with a strength to bless.\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nReading Lines in the Sea Foam
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe continuous white line of the surf \r\nOverwrites what was written there first  \r\nWith more of the same.  More of the same \r\nMid-sentence message: sans beginning, sans \r\nEnd, an incessant erasure of sea and sand, \r\nA crescive hissing as if, as if playing a game. \r\n\r\nSo I walked, myself a man in the middle, \r\nAs irresolute as unfinished, lulled \r\nBy the sound, calmed by seeing my footsteps \r\nMisspelled as I passed, or stood looking on, \r\nLeaving nothing behind to trouble one \r\nWho followed tidelines, reading where I have read. \r\n\r\nIf confusion arose which line was preferred  \r\nThe sea never, never slowed for loss of words, \r\nAs unhesitant in writing as erasure. \r\nIndeed the beating thing seemed to be to be, \r\nTo keep even the pace of newness with waste-- \r\nProfligate perhaps, but oh so assured.\r\n<\/pre>\n
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\n*** And Savior Came There None ***
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\r\nThe toil of all that be \r\nHelps not the primal fault; \r\nIt rains into the sea, \r\nAnd still the sea is salt. \r\n~~A E Housman \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nMy Dream of Reefs
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\r\nMore mossy than the stillest wooded pond, \r\nMore grotto than all those Roman fountains, \r\nQuiet as a night without any end-- \r\nMy dream of reefs, the sandy waters under them. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nRoll On, Combers
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nRoll your rifle-barrels to the beach, \r\nRoll with steely reaching. \r\nRoll on, combers. \r\n\r\nJericho of unfinished walls \r\nRoll on, I praise thy roar and fall. \r\nRoll on, combers. \r\n\r\nCrash dice against the jetties, \r\nRoll bones against our bleakness. \r\nRoll on, combers. \r\n\r\nCome thunder, come coil of storm, \r\nRoll on, voice of throats unborn! \r\nRoll on, combers. \r\n\r\nWhile time billows and music floods \r\nRoll on, repeat the resounding chord. \r\nRoll on, combers. \r\n\r\nRoll as you have always rolled. \r\nRoll on, toil, moil of echoes. \r\nRoll on, combers, roll on. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nA Sailor’s Prayer
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\r\nLet all not be but rock and fate, \r\nA necklace of broken backs \r\nHung round the nearest outcrop. \r\nLet mercy guide me and my mates, \r\nLet ease enter with every tack \r\nAgainst stripping wind's constant strop. \r\n\r\nI guess all prayer's beseeching, \r\nA word into the wind, a keen \r\nFear for what may come unasked. \r\nHands in prayer clapped are reaching \r\nFrom wave's trough into the unseen, \r\nTwo oars with lonely rowing tasked. \r\n\r\nI give thanks when the water's calm, \r\nThe moon like a pearl upon it \r\nAnd all the slap of waves soft applause. \r\nThanks I give to the Helmsman \r\nFrom Honolulu to Narragansett, \r\nThanks for each wild swell and pause. \r\n<\/pre>\n
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\nFisherman’s Complaint
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n\"Spray's no place to keep home in, \r\nNot for us, who, true, came from wet-- \r\nBut must live dry with fingered fins.\"\r\n\"And ears dry that'd rather hear music.\"  \r\n\r\n\"I'll sing all day, if you'll pull the net!\"  \r\n\"Grab your side and heave, and we'll \r\nSing together and call that music.\"  \r\n\"Oh, heave-ho, the day-o--Aw, hell \r\n\r\nI've no song for the work today. \r\nJanice hates the smell of fish \r\nWhen home I tromp.  And that's the way \r\nI'm getting to get, too... fish.\" \r\n\r\nAnd so they trawled the silence in \r\nUntil the sinking sun's oil slick \r\nWas well past its orange and golden \r\nWallowing--the bay black, a drained sink. \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nAnd Savior Came There None
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI bared my chest and brought \r\nMyself to the bitter brink; \r\nI stepped into two rubber fins, \r\nStrapped on a silver mask. \r\n\r\nThrough a tube so narrow,\r\nMy breath both came and went; \r\nA sound like someone drowning \r\nTo my two ears was sent. \r\n\r\nBeneath a watery curve of sky \r\nI began to dive and glide; \r\nSudden worlds of sunken wonder \r\nAppeared bursting at my side. \r\n\r\nSandscapes of stranded castles,\r\nAll colors and every size; \r\nSwift fins of fabled angels \r\nRushed silent before my eyes....\r\n\r\nWhat was home now I was here \r\nA weightless angel like the rest? \r\nOh, that my restless breath would cease \r\nAnd I be more than guest! \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nDown and In
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI fell into a deepening sea \r\nAs a star falls out of the night; \r\nI fell to unskinnable knees \r\nFrom a too-urgent height. \r\n\r\nThe cold that I encountered \r\nFlowed around me--within \r\nMy star's carbon burning embered,\r\nAll shining at an end. \r\n\r\nThe seaward insistence of rivers \r\nBecame ocean's dread suck inside. \r\nI rolled among those silvers;\r\nI sank into those tides. \r\n\r\nNow down, and in, and dark, \r\nI hang like a lantern suspended.\r\nDeprived of wire and spark, \r\nThe sea inevitably enters. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\n*** Diving for Pearls ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAlone 'mongst Indians in Canoes, \r\nSometime o're-turn'd, I have been \r\nHalf an inch from death, in Ocean deepe, \r\nGods wonders I have seene. \r\n~~Roger Williams, founder of \r\n    Rhode Island colony  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nInto the Deep Blue Sea
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe handshake of an electric eel \r\nCould make a postcard politician feel; \r\nThe Sun Fish, that seems but half a fish, \r\nMakes bullet-passage with its half-swish; \r\nJellies that congregate maintain at noon \r\nA delicate transparency of moons; \r\nSharks that mark the green sea-swath \r\nInspire fear with props of fin and froth; \r\nThe melodramatic dark of the Manta Ray \r\nSwings more cape than cutlass in the bay; \r\nThe nippy urchin rolled on his hairy spines \r\nWon't be soon confused for a ball of twine; \r\nFlying Fish that scissor off Catalina \r\nOut-leap the terrible teeth of barracuda. \r\nFor every ocean-going predator there is another \r\nWho knows an older (and bigger) brother. \r\nIn this marine realm of fight and fight \r\nThe old sun's sword cuts but filtered light-- \r\nOur salt-stung eyesight goes only so far below \r\nThe sine of wave and gemmy billow.\r\n\r\nAlthough the wide ocean's vast is vast, \r\nOur ignorance sailed it centuries past \r\n--Our ignorance vaster than oceans! \r\nAnd still for our ignorance we have questions: \r\nNot how wide our unknowing spreads, \r\nBut how deep it still can poke its head. \r\nTo trawl and sound and step the depth of seas, \r\nFirst we name our ignorance \u2018mystery.' \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nThe Tourist
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sea before he entered it was swift, \r\nA rift of bright like an abalone shell. \r\nDown in, its dance and glimmer grew more dense, \r\nGrew nigh invisible, a fist enclos- \r\nIng like glue, a push of rippled weight \r\nBuckling his legs behind, or else a silent pull... \r\nWaters willing him wade in deeper yet. \r\nCrenellations of the waiting reef were \r\nCircle on circle of green shingles piled, \r\nA pagoda for fishes' flittering sleeves, \r\nKeen to keep their wisdom and their world their own. \r\nStill he stooped to investigate what gaps \r\nGave access, what recesses might show as  \r\nOpen when poked, kneeling almost where \r\nThe darkness gathered him forward hunched, \r\nWreathed with fronds or waving fans of coral, \r\nSpying spectacularly with his camera and flash \r\n--A startlement of light that washed all back \r\nAs when cosmos first from nothingness was hurled.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nFirst Dive
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nNow down, I took my breathing easy, as I was taught. \r\nStill, I flinched at fins swiving past my arms, \r\nWatched dumb as trailing bubbles belled through wet light \r\nWhere wide tides walked. \r\n\r\nOcean's wounded sound was silence.  That enveloped all. \r\nThat tempered each crested crash of surface waters. \r\nThat tucked me under--dull quiet--into an unrung bell \r\nOf amniotic salts. \r\n\r\nSlowly, what had galled, gelled into new norms.... \r\nLassoes of shadow cinched, then pooled, without menace. \r\nNew, hushed harmonies sang out when schooling swarms \r\nDivided round the fault \r\n\r\nI interposed by standing there, a weighted fence. \r\nImmersed in those bold blues the ocean knew, \r\nI felt at once insignificant and immense: \r\nA full and empty vault. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nBeneath Actinic Light
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDown into a darker level of the sea \r\nI sank with oxygen and spotlight; \r\nLead-weights buckled like a studded belt \r\nTo keep pants up, kept me sinking free. \r\n\r\nI passed a coral outcrop, color-flooded, \r\nAnd watched the atmosphere give up its glow-- \r\nA darkness swelling fresh from deep below \r\nUntil the most innocent rock looked hooded. \r\n\r\nFor sound I had a squeal of captive air, \r\nA tick-tick of equipment like a ladder round \r\nClumsily fumbled going drunken down, \r\nWith no soft rest of grass waiting there. \r\n\r\nBefore a cave-hole I hung with bright device, \r\nThe only apparition bearing any light \r\nSo low below, to that deep under-height. \r\nI shined what sun I brought into the crevice: \r\n\r\nAnd there I saw a swirl or flash or spot \r\nOf more colors than my rainbow count  \r\nOf red, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet-- \r\nA living ribbon of... I knew not.... \r\n\r\nI tried as many angles as I could access \r\nTo see what went slippery behind dead coral, \r\nBut left blind as I had been--without a moral-- \r\nHaving shoved hand, eye, light into a recess. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nNo Upper Summer
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDeep beneath all that light could bring of news,\r\nBeneath empty sky, and beneath the heavy \r\nWet of the Atlantic shelf's continental pew \r\n(Where light is crushed into a black mascara jelly \r\n\r\nAnd what is seen is felt by eyeless thew), \r\nSmall volcano smokestacks erupt from rock \r\nAnd pour their sulfur poisons, hid from view-- \r\nHid from everything one would be led to think.... \r\n\r\nYet gathered round each bare and broken vent, \r\nArrayed as bloom-petals around a central stem, \r\nPlume and worm and life are duly bent, \r\nStudying the steady heat as old men \r\n\r\nStudy the hearth-fire in their winter dens. \r\nLife hangs, even here, as a clef upon its stave, \r\nSinging silent psalms to purgatory summer when \r\nNo upper summer gives what buried earth burns and gives. \r\n \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
\nDiving for Pearls
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe gold fan-coral waved soft as Gretel's locks \r\nAnd waved me onward, way by way, \r\nTo pearl-oyster nooks in the pocketwatch bay;\r\nHidden places where none would look. \r\n\r\nAwash with calm beneath the sunny calm of day, \r\nWith warmth that kept all doubt suspended,\r\nMy querulous flippers flapped me upended; \r\nKept nose grounded and sandy-cloudy. \r\n\r\nAn oyster bed I'd found there for just myself,\r\nOysters piled in unsliding mounds. \r\nI reached into the pearlescent hill's half-round \r\nFor what I myself could grasp of wealth.\r\n\r\nWith sack slumped full and hard lungs demanding, \r\nI came up fast to the raft for air. \r\nI took my short knife and jimmied rims right there, \r\nCracked pulled oysters with rough handling. \r\n\r\nI poked discarded purple guts for pearls,\r\nHeld soft sunlight cupped in shells--\r\nPeeled mask and peered to see myself as well. \r\nWhat I saw reflected I would not tell. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nSuspension, or The Diver
\n<\/h2>\n
for Yvonne Montanino<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nA liquid weightless zero pull arrives as\r\nShe dismounts the boat into the moulting waves; \r\nAlthough she sinks herself as in a grave, \r\nAir would be with air and stay alive. \r\n\r\nAll the push of nature pops her like a cork; \r\nTo keep her curious nose nose-down is work. \r\nTo reach toward treasure in the yeasty dark \r\nShe rows against her buoyant heft, an anti-lark.\r\n\r\nDimmer blurs emerge as old light lets go \r\nAnd water-deepness keeps her dull below. \r\nThen, a burst of breath for pearly curtain, \r\nTurns orientation less than certain. \r\n\r\nNo longer can she feel a down in bones, \r\nThe globe surrounding an emergent zone \r\nOf everywhichway arrows, striped and finned. \r\nAll's confusion, hazard, a map unpinned. \r\n\r\nThere is nor up nor down, but all is round--\r\nAnd she the center of the spun ball, no less. \r\nAnd then begins a small bubble in the brain: \r\nI confess, I must dive into this weightlessness\r\n\r\nAgain.<\/em>\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
Swimming Around a Volcano<\/h2>\n
\r\nAs if in search of revelation I\r\nDescended, dived\r\nBetween dead cracks of an old volcano\r\nIsland abandoned\r\nBy all but reefs. The plunge undid me--\r\nThe world I entered \r\nReeled unreal, slopes of black glass and ash:\r\nPleated cliffs \r\nThat slid at every angle like fallen wings. \r\n\r\nAnd the sea was grass,\r\n\r\nAs in a psalm of inattentive shepherds lost\r\nIn strange valleys\r\nFloods had closed.  Glad rayed fans of coral\r\nReached like wreckage--\r\nUnpruned since the solitary cone had cooled\r\n(Oh, an age ago\r\nAs far as new life proliferating might reckon),\r\nLifting their neon palms   \r\nTo desert heaven.  And, above heaven, silent,\r\n\r\nGod, absent and calm. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\n*** Finding Lionfish Everywhere ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nFull many a fathom down beneath\r\nThe bright arch of the splendid deep\r\nMy ear has heard the sea-shell breathe\r\nO'er living myriads in their sleep.\r\n~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nA Transparent Heart
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nUnclouded I sit at my tideline task. \r\nHipless jellyfish pulse, intricately limbed \r\nBetween my knees, beneath my diver's mask, \r\nBell-bodies beating slow as living chimes. \r\n\r\nTheir white summer dresses but lightly veil \r\nA teasing rictus of richer innards: \r\nA plume of brain like a peacock's tail, \r\nA transparent heart that shows the sand. \r\n\r\nHere's one who feels a nothing in my hand, \r\nWhose string limbs curl their inching purple \r\nAround a curved inviting fingerend \r\nAs if a morning reminder tied--and lapsed. \r\n\r\nAll I had forgotten floods to mind suddenly; \r\nExpelled thoughts that had been supple \r\nCloud my mask with breathing ill-at-ease, \r\nComplexing a day that had been simple. \r\n\r\nNo longer can I play easy as they seem, \r\nLetting tufts of plankton, water, light, and all \r\nPass through me as through an open transom-- \r\nMy heart beating transparent, clear and small. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nThe Hermit Crab
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen he lets his inner curl of anchor go \r\nLike a weightlifter giving all that gravity back \r\nAnd leaves his comma tracks incised in dough \r\nPointing like a murderer to his abandoned shack, \r\nHe drags all of himself there really ever was  \r\nAcross the sea floor's unforgiving foreign sands \r\nInto some striped or spotted larger emptiness, \r\nAnd there drops anchor, there makes his stand.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nCultivation
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nDamselfish are farmers: kill coral bald, \r\nThen plow an algae patch on the barren spot. \r\nThey'll bite an intrusive diver waving by, \r\nTap angry at mask and gear until they weary--\r\nSo keenly they tend what they raise on rock. \r\nToward every threat they flit: diminutive, bold. \r\n\r\nTheir bluff of territory they domesticate,\r\nChew wrong weeds away, howsoever small, \r\nAnd comb with care each ragged straggler spume. \r\nThey fence close their field with a farmer's gait,\r\nName the milk cow, chime the children home.\r\nThey flit and flit unfailing, hovering over all.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nThe Clownfish and the Anemone
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA clownfish, my dear, whose name is mirth, \r\nLives laughing within neon harms of his host; \r\nFans out orange scare-fins at butterflyfish; \r\nGrins his teeth and retreats--in home tentacles lost. \r\n\r\nThe anemone herself, a squatting chalice, \r\nThrows her fist of poisoned arrow-arms to sting; \r\nAnd then into her central hive of malice \r\nRecalls sparred darts, her living victim entangling. \r\n\r\nTogether they live, you see, together thrive-- \r\nThe clownfish aerating and defending, \r\nThe anemone parrying and providing-- \r\nA dance of two as intimate as anything alive. \r\n\r\nA dance as endless as a willful marriage; \r\nA dance, my dear, I daren't disparage. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nWhales Falling like Leaves
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAn indigo shadow falls along the ocean floor  \r\nThat in shallows would be a beginning reef \r\nAnd start a coral flourish from a spoor \r\nAnd bring, in time, some tidy ship to grief. \r\n\r\nBut here in deeps the ship of skeleton is cast, \r\nLowering to be feed, and not to be fed, \r\nA blue whale corpse settling in at last-- \r\nA sleeping giant on a giant bed. \r\n\r\nAnd here for years will come the uncomely work \r\nOf claw and tentacle, enzyme and tooth; \r\nNo bones left for an archeologist's pick, \r\nWho could admire such appetite for truth. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nWanting God in the Seaweed
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nJust beyond what grasp would give to want, \r\nJust where my shrunken horizon's foreshortened \r\nBy kelp and eelgrass and water-logged sand, \r\nTill all I see's a greeny mix-and-mist \r\n\r\nInto which I adamantly wish to stretch and reach, \r\nAnd find beyond my finely granulated sight \r\nSomething to hold to through the shade of night, \r\nSomething to give assurance, however slight, \r\n\r\nHowever less a something than a pebble caught \r\nAnd kept in reminiscence in a handy pocket \r\nAnd petted for luck, or looked at like a locket, \r\nSomething to calm the terror, as a beach \r\n\r\nBy the ocean's attentive petting palm is laved, \r\nThat keeps its variable fringe of whiteness crisp  \r\nWith the back and forth of wrist and whisk \r\nOf that invisible hand who never waved to me.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nThe Octopus’ Ghost
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nAn octopus I had not known was there  \r\nJetted off--and left aloft his ink ghost \r\nDancing eight tentacles in water-air \r\nOff a shoulder of coral, a foot at most \r\nIn front of where I hovered unaware. \r\n\r\nIt had, in ink, the shape of sagging brain-sac; \r\nIt had the sly suavity of tentacles \r\nAs well, believably beating in its track. \r\nItself had long gone behind pinnacles \r\nOf dawning coral, and would not come back.  \r\n\r\nWith my own waiting sack weightless in hand,\r\nI prodded a likely cranny or two, \r\nHoping to cull home what now coiled hidden \r\nIn rock and nook.  I poked, too, through what debris \r\nThe octopus had left for hint about his den. \r\n\r\nWhat feasts from his dinner-plate were scraped! \r\nCrabs galore, as well as fans of scallop shells \r\nLike leaves blown in the wake of striding capes; \r\nAn empty turtle rocking like a bell; \r\nFish skeletons delicately draped. \r\n\r\nI wavered amazed, inked in my own surprise. \r\nWhat had I thought would happen here below? \r\nAll morning I'd chased the octopus for prize, \r\nAll morning observed camouflage and flow \r\nOf the watchful octopus, his goatlike eyes. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nFinding Lionfish Everywhere
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWatch the waving lionfish in deeply dappled light: \r\nHis slender fins are batons conducting camouflage, \r\nTricks of if adept at blinds as the coming on of night: \r\nDimwit eyes see zip in passage of his wild extravagance. \r\n\r\nSo he weaves, decieves, and is, with many gaudy brocades \r\nAs a zebra's made to blend and be, a wave of the savanna; \r\nAs aged great apes with false politesse share rare bananas--\r\nRetitred prizefighters holding hands, retreating to shared shade. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nThe Goliath Grouper
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhat thoughts are gathered in a grouper's eye, \r\nWho watches quiet-gilled reef-life go by? \r\nUnstartled as a weedy rock, he juts \r\nA low slow-opening brown jaw that waits \r\nUntil some swimming bits of mere scenery \r\nFocus into French Grunts, get bit as bait. \r\n\r\nWhat the grouper thinks, with his down-turned pout \r\nJabbering wide between coral's teal rebuttal points, \r\nIs what's caught by him is caught for good, \r\nBeyond debate good Socrates understood. \r\n--His principle dissolves all beyond retort. \r\nWhatever he thinks, he lives by this inner acid. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nReaching After Stingrays
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nStung by something about the whiptail ray \r\n(That mere leaning past my gunwale couldn't relieve),\r\nHad me slither under water a little way \r\nTo unsettle sand, and give the sleeping ray a shove;   \r\nAnd note which way, if any, it might move. \r\n\r\nAs sand spread flat on sand it was well-disguised; \r\nAn anxious angler had naught to notice \r\nWho noticed not its eyebrow-pleated eye--\r\nNo more than a black marble made of ice. \r\nI laid a bare finger down to stroke its spine. \r\n\r\nMy eyes went shut, as when prayer comes, \r\nOr trigger-pull releases a clapping shot. \r\nThe last I saw was a shiver of skirts;  gone,   \r\nThe sudden nothing of a disturb\u00e9d spot \r\nWhere sand had lain allayed--an untied knot. \r\n\r\nIts muslin, I'll tell you what, was mostly spurs, \r\nThe petting of a sandpaper cantaloupe; \r\nLike hanging on bare-handed to a spar \r\nToo long, while your sailboat works a slope;\r\nCompelled to keep on hanging on to hope \r\n\r\nWithout the relief of a defining splinter \r\nTo remind sore palms what has been survived.\r\nFor all my alien contact, I lacked a scar.\r\nI forgot to watch it fly to new disguise--\r\nThe ray's rough touch so froze me mesmerized. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nSchooling
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWe watched a barracuda through a drive of tuna \r\nCull the moving grove like a narrow gardener \r\nBuzzing dewy hedgerows bloody with each pass. \r\nLike a needle neatly teethed it turned and passed, \r\nIts narrow head thrust neat as any tempered sword \r\nInto the passing banks of backs, the flanks of passing tuna. \r\n\r\nWith more than death's blade it laid the silver sward-- \r\nWith a tailor's attentive vim it slimmed the herd\r\nAnd let the hardy swim on hardly swerved. \r\nYou'd've thought it would've had to look more hard, \r\nSwimming thick through such puffed clouds of blood.... \r\nWe let hard breaths escape we hadn't known we held. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nA Symphony of Limpets
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI touch cratered spots of dead-ember rock \r\nWhere limpets live and carve their days in quiet; \r\nThey've left round fingerpads for flutes, mocking \r\nThe silent sea with music quite as mute-- \r\n\r\nAnd I imagine them going so, notes without sound, \r\nA moot music that moves me as I ponder it, \r\nA gnarl of icy current coming down \r\nStiff against my neck, a thrill like Mozart. \r\n\r\nThe limpets pulled themselves away to graze \r\nDispersed among wet wonderments of rock.\r\nNightfall finds them home in full assemblage, \r\nStone-gowned choristers in stone pews, their stops \r\n\r\nShut up from the melodic play of day; \r\nHunger's harried morning at rest in surfeit. \r\nSuckered to the deep rock's dimpled grey, \r\nThey seem no more than a cluster of camp tents\r\n\r\nReturned to fireless quiet and nightlong wait. \r\nNothing's happened here, I know, and yet.... \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nSpanish Dancer
\n<\/h2>\n
a nudibranch ballet<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nAn interstellar cloud as red \r\nAs a flamenco dress' drape \r\nWhirled alive from heel to head \r\nWhile I gaped. \r\n\r\nEvery pulse of its skirt \r\nTo love was spur; \r\nA rouge that had the look \r\nOf blood in water. \r\n\r\nStaring at my Spanish dancer  \r\nI balanced less on tarnished earth \r\n(Such constellations are so rare) \r\nThan heaven's turf. \r\n\r\nVouchsafed a glimpse \r\n(Temporary, reddish, blurred) \r\nOf all that love could wish: \r\nEcstasy's the only word. \r\n\r\nI longed to throw away \r\nMyself with such abandon.... \r\nInstead distilled I stay, \r\nTo life condemned--\r\n\r\nAn underwater witness \r\nTo all her flare and flash, \r\nHung embalmed in wetness \r\nAs if in ashes. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nPins and Needles
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA rubber fin disturbed an urchin\r\nWith its wind, set it rolling on its pins\r\nUntil, irked itself, it came to a tottered \r\nStop, its rayed array of clockhands locked--\r\nAs when a seamstress pins her pattern \r\nUntil her stitching ticks tight each seam\r\nAnd she shakes her gown in sunlight, and it gleams.\r\nSo all that lives seeks an equilibrium;\r\nLike the talker who hammers hard his theme,\r\nOnly to stutter it home to a glottal rest.  \r\nThus the urchin squats, itself its own wild nest. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nWhen We Were Lungfish
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nThe sea is our cold underworld for sure, \r\nStranded from us by interposing glass--\r\nA transparency through which we once had passed, \r\nAnd once only, tenderfooting to the lure \r\n\r\nOf being safely beached out of water's danger,\r\nOf being able to safely lay our eggs, and lie \r\nA moment unmolested before we died.\r\nWe were lungfish lunging lustily from water, \r\n\r\nAway from the sea's dire dread and hunger \r\nWhich sizzled at our backs as we basked, \r\nReminder of the fire with which all life is tasked\r\nAnd to which, lungs burning, we went back under. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nSea Turtles in Moonlight
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen our moon at perigee comes bobbing low,\r\nAnd dots of turtle hatchlings get tottering\r\nToward eating surfs the moon's low blues arouse,\r\nWe wake to watch such evening things carouse.\r\nWe imagine magic moondust falling,\r\nSilvering starting life with its enhancing glow....\r\n\r\nBut such light we love is made of nothing.\r\nSuch a moon--big, rare--is neither here nor there.\r\n\r\nLife does what life must, despite moon's baleful dare.\r\nRidley sea turtles crawl flaring seaward,\r\nKiller whales calve when aches come nearer,\r\nNo matter how far the moon is raised or lowered.\r\nSo, too, we swim into the dousing fate we share:\r\nForward, forward, however awkward toward.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nFiddler Crabs Walking Backwards at Sunset
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nA crab scrabbles in the sidelight like a hand \r\nFollowing the brown back-and-forth of tidal froth, \r\nLeaving crabbed cuneiform music in the sand. \r\n\r\nBroad-backed, elaborate in their armored masque \r\nThey seem to play impervious to sympathy \r\n--Some Schoenberg concerto more like math \r\n\r\nThan music, tracing melodies beside the tuning sea \r\nThat anchors their staticky abstractions \r\nWith a patient mother's patient shush and sigh, \r\n\r\nA mother's low oboe-toned repetitions \r\nCalming crablike child-hands pulling at her hem-- \r\nA consonance like strummed guitar-strings coming then. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nTreading Water in Mosquito Bay
\n<\/h2>\n
the bioluminescent bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nAt midnight, the bay's a blue florescent iris. \r\nBy day, nothing strobes the water but its sheen, \r\nPolished green like one large tropical leaf-- \r\nA royal palm, perhaps, or some other green. \r\n\r\nLater, sunset tips its bucket of jelly yellows, \r\nDrips its fist of melted crayons to belilac \r\nThe unwary eye, as day goes wet away into the west \r\nAnd slews of broken inks bleed out veins of night. \r\n\r\nIt takes a long while to notice, as one stands looking, \r\nThe faint, hairy, spectral, disturbed bulb-glow begin: \r\nHow slow to show that blue, like a deflated moon \r\nIn the bay, or calm dead face tilted at the chin. \r\n\r\nSoon swift wakes of kayaks come with tails of white, \r\nAnd naked swimmers dim the eye, ephemeral  \r\nWater-skimmers stirring a placid plate of lake--\r\nAround their beating limbs, a phosphorescence: frail \r\n\r\nWings and feathers.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\n*** Crying Ahoy! ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nWhen you and I and sunset go\r\nAway and come back\r\nAlways there's the quick feeling \"oh!\r\nNever again just that.\"\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nMaking the Breakers
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI swam until my breath was near unreeled, \r\nMy tired feet beginning to blue with cold, \r\nMy wet face raw, freshly peeled. \r\n\r\nI was almost back to where breakers crashed,\r\nIn from the solipsistic serenity \r\nOf a farther sea's swollen wash.\r\n\r\nI made the float's spare deck, and flung upon it, \r\nScrabbled uneven in the sudden rocking, then\r\nFelt hard waves hit as first I sat. \r\n\r\nAll the horizon-line--where eyes would hold, could \r\nHold in all the wave of world surrounding--\r\nWas sea reeling, and so cold.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nImpromptu Squall
\n<\/h2>\n
The weathercock is the wisest man.
\n                 ~~Emerson, Journals<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\nThe ocean flat as a ballroom\r\nLied an idle unswaying blue, \r\nUnmoving as a quadrille\r\nUncommenced, concealing still \r\nWhat turbulence might come. \r\nThe storm's fox-trotting rim\r\nEncroached smoky and smeared, \r\nA hem of darkness lapping near.\r\n\r\nDespite our not wanting it\r\nBad weather came--it came anyway, \r\nIts thunders en pointe in a troupe. \r\nThe little craft's tango yaw \r\nAnd debilitating rapid pitch \r\nDipped us jaundiced to our gills;\r\nBack-leading the lifted rail, \r\nWe felt green horizons shift. \r\n\r\nRod and line, set nodding, pressed\r\nStep-by-step into clipped chass\u00e9; \r\nStill stronger weathers threatened near.\r\nThe captain tapped his radar clear--\r\nSweep and countersweep cried out \r\nAllemande left with a caller's shout:\r\nCloudbanks do-si-doing there, our\r\nDark partners bowing, fear to fear. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nVersions in Runny Moonlight
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nI\r\nThe moon like a run of soldering on calm water, \r\nA silver seam between two broken shelving shards, \r\nA liquid line that welds the world together; \r\nWhat had been separate has come to oneness, hard. \r\n\r\nI I\r\nLaying like a discarded satin tie, the moon upon the waters; \r\nAll those bronze sheets of day torn off without a trace, \r\nJust this one loose dock-rope thrown from the departing boat-- \r\nA line of luminous paint on a dark and changing face. \r\n\r\nI I I \r\nA sparkling line of gunpowder leads to the furious moon, \r\nA barrel of spoons tipped into the slow smash of waters \r\nBeating on seas' wide knees a raggedy country tune.  Whatever \r\nSong has brought me here, I say: let this one bring me farther. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nJoyriding the Night Sea
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn the pulpit of a powerboat,\r\nI pitched and passed the last black buoy.\r\nI was flying at hazard past bay and float\r\nFar into the dark, far past scraps of day.\r\n\r\nThe trussed hull slapped and rattled like a bow\r\nOnce the arrow's loosed, once the sprung string untwists \r\nBack into the normal tension life allows-- \r\nMy thrashed spine raw as an archer's wrist.\r\n\r\nSpray that left the bowsprit in a whip\r\nFlash-froze my face to its forward task;\r\nWhatever thoughts might keep an inward grip \r\nLeft no outward trace as they passed.\r\n\r\nDarkness was all, and darkness all I was.\r\nAbove, no puncture appeared for stars to shine.\r\nBeneath, a deafening raging motor buzzed\r\nDriving the fiberglass arrowhead\r\n\r\nBlind into anything alive. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nMeeting at Sea
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nHow the running wave assaults the pebbles \r\nWith polyuphloisbios<\/em> on its breath, \r\nSliding up in such hurried fluffed excitement \r\nYou'd think the sea came reporting troubles. \r\nYet the sea has no more to tell us two of death \r\nThan its usual haul of impermanence. \r\n\r\nNo more floods from its mouthful bubbles \r\nThan yesterday's foam had told in brief, \r\nOr, indeed, what the day before that had meant. \r\nWhat I keep an ear for when we watch the wash \r\nBriskly sweeping the edge, is not belief, \r\nBut to hear known news in doublement. \r\n\r\nThe one cold comfort that comes with age \r\nIs how old saws still cut true with grief, \r\nHow sighs race sands to bewilderment \r\nAnd go on sighing their wavery treble, \r\nTide in and out sighing without cease \r\nIn the same wet bliss as when first we met. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nFirst Push, Then Pull
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nSand flows slower through hands underwater,\r\nMeets more resistance, as a child her dad's cheek \r\nKisses more carefully unshaven. \r\n\r\nTime itself seems less pressed to palter \r\nWhen flowed along through a tide's enlarging lens, \r\nThe hourglass turned and turned again. \r\n\r\nHere a stasis friction where edges met  \r\nSeemed to rule us all that long first afternoon, \r\nKeeping us standing like fountain shadows. \r\n\r\nWe were just ourselves it seemed, and yet \r\nSlower, like sand in tidal pools at noon, \r\nWarmer where the sun flows oblique below. \r\n\r\nIn our tidal stillness we standing stood, \r\nThe sea as salt within us as it was without, \r\nAll push and pull at pause.  And that was good.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nTogether the Moving Waves
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nTogether, quiet, we moved in the wake of waves,\r\nTogether found the rhythm of how we were made \r\nTo be together, and be together saved. \r\n\r\nAll afternoon we lived in all the play of shade \r\nAnd play of wet and light as rayed sunset \r\nSummoned us to dinner beyond the cove's glade. \r\n\r\nTogether before pineapple and pork we sat, \r\nTwo dim humans alight with love of all  \r\nThe love we had, and in that light we ate. \r\n\r\nWe sat until the stars themselves began to fall \r\nSingly into the shingle of the sea \r\nAnd so made place for still new stars to fall. \r\n\r\nIt was as if we sat at creation's knee, \r\nTwo serious children thrown into the all \r\nAnd settled on the ocean's verge to be.\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nChihuly’s Illuminated Spears
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nChihuly's illuminated spears line the gravel walk, \r\nTossed from a florescent urchin's stegosauric back. \r\n\r\nThe Seattle night is wet and fresh, a champagne wash \r\nFrivolous and spastic as the sea's moulting crash. \r\n\r\nInside the glass house, a signature warp of light \r\nDouses the house's sides like a blue-whale's flukes caught \r\n\r\nTurning screw-wise in twilight off some far Pacific isle. \r\nWe dare a side-room.  Above, oddities bobble, quilled \r\n\r\nRadiant by strobes, directed lances of dapple-light-- \r\nAs if we lived enreefed beneath such laser shapes of sight: \r\n\r\nOrange palm-fronds frozen lustrous in mid-unfurling, \r\nRazor aloe-limbs pronged and leaning gleaming \r\n\r\nLike licked licorice-sticks.  Nearby, purple fluted gourds  \r\nGangle at all angles: ripe, overripe, engorged-- \r\n\r\nTrumpets, too, of red sponges, while canopies of eyes \r\nPop surprised from indigo skeins of rind--corkscrew rays \r\n\r\nOf yellow intensity, the abrupt structures of cell \r\nAutomata, endless whims of fin and tooth, flares of hell \r\n\r\nA drowning man, a man sans land, knows all too well. \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nEnvoi<\/p>\n
The Quiet Tide
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\nIn the lonely presence of the quiet tide \r\nThere's a wisdom the cawing gull derides. \r\nLook about you: in life, in death on every side. \r\nThere is wisdom in subside, subside, subside.  \r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\n*** Essay ***
\n<\/h2>\n
\r\n<\/pre>\n
 <\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
\nEye of the Devilfish
\n<\/h2>\n
\nFinding large nature looking back.  Grand Cayman, circa 1974<\/em><\/p>\n
\nIt was our first winter in paradise, as the flair-panted travel agent had named it.  Perhaps, if our cranky memories could be searched, or sifted, we might be able to rehearse other names, other colors.  It was a strange island spot, a stone in the ocean;  a black volcanic liberated of its native Caliban until my dad winged in.  Or maybe, dwelling in the distracted haze of the past, it is actually some type or taste of an involuted, infolded space, like a physicist’s undone laundry, and not the island haven the glossy brochure proclaimed at all, with no long stretches of unblemished sand tastefully spiced by ripe brown native boys singing hymnals after dark.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhatever it was, our squeaking wheels touched it and our silver wings groaned when released by its buoyant being of their humid load of air.  The airstrip’s attendant, whose dark trousers were enlivened by nimble piping, and who had rolled the streamlined stairway to our squat airplane’s door, lifted his blue policeman’s hat in greeting before hunching off with all of our crammed winter bags under his thin arms.  He trundled them to the custom-officer’s desk in a cavernous aqua-blue room, disturbing the game of Caribbean solitaire in which he had been immersed (in that quaint island version, voodooic queen outranked staunch aces).  A frowning queen of hearts pinned my still snow-booted toe as he gave our bursting bags the standard shuffle and no lurid contraband emerged.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe five of us had trouble getting all the cases through the far door that dawned on palms which our porter-cum-custom’s-officer-cum-police-chieftain had managed to wrangle to his dinged desk with a gibbon’s ease, and had to wave goodbye with only four stiffly wiggling fingers, all of our thumbs still stuck through slipping handles.\n<\/p>\n
\nOnce at the huts, adorably florescent and fashioned of an enduring type of concrete, we let our northern layers of zippered skin slither from us in a sweating frenzy that eventually pooled at our feet in a species of languid gratitude.  Old skins and old whims (as represented by the fragrantly sticky multi-hued stain of a forgotten popsicle picked up at the Newark terminal and allowed to bloom thus darkly on my dark December coat) were left in a soggy stack by the front egress, not to be re-touched or re-donned until the last, lingering tick of the vacation had passed and we were ready to reassume the cold masks and colder duties of our remote, home, higher hemisphere.\n<\/p>\n
\nMy brothers and I, all boys, spent a few gummed moments twisting out of our snowpants and screwing back into our handy mom’s proffered shorts before racing out the pliant backdoor towards the hunkered gem of the ocean.  Looking back down the cross-hairs of time’s telescope, I spotted the droning outline of my dad (already on the phone conducting his sinister business) and the docile, backlit slide of my mom, methodically filling the empty drawers with our horded summerwear, and efficiently slipping lifeless thing onto thin hangers.  From the dark, angular closet, a ghost-white shirt shook its sleeves in parting as we scampered headlong down the sweetly simpering beach.\n<\/p>\n
\nWe were met at the drooling lip (or perhaps it was knee-deep on the lascivious tongue) of the peacock-blue sea by the two underaged representatives of a blonde quartet that composed the entire tidy family of one of my dad’s harem of business associates.  The dissolving names of the two before us, standing in the photo, as it were, long and tan with white shorts, come galloping up from memory’s transmogrified mess, in one of its babble of reassigned languages–which correlates strangely (do not ask me how) with its hazy tendency to switch beloved heads and plop them on the glimpsed frames of IDless bodies, giving some blonde and tanned cousin a pale and darkly furred torso, or worse, wrenching some ebon-haired past-love with a classic nose and twinkling eyes onto the still grinding pelvis and shoulders of a cheap pick-up (one of those fated matings tinged with incestuousness) whose active legs were patched together by a starkly orange pubis–come galloping, as I say, these names, to the tip of my still remembering, still trembling tongue to tumble out in plain prose, this far from the original inspiration of the actual beach, as King and Courteous.  Well, it is obvious that I have misplaced somebody’s bags and tags, but it is as close as I can get, squinting into memory’s dim box.  As the men of the Fire League say, or chant at their bachelor barbecues, A hose is a hose is a hose.\n<\/p>\n
\nIt was not very long before the older of the pair, courteous King, not royally lonesome Courteous, got the idea of hopping into his bleached dad’s Boston whaler, the Sun Temple, and hailed the rest of us, still swirled in sand, to abandon our half-melted castles and sagging minarets and join him where the tingling, tangled water thumped his prow.  We jumped from our tepid tidepools, abandoning our squids, and leaving cruelly declawed crabs in our wake, and slogged against the rising tide to reach the uneven gunwale out of breath.\n<\/p>\n
\nAs we whisked along the island’s edge, Courteous kept us entertained with stories of the family doberman pincher, often caught thrusting its whittled head into the neighbor’s mailbox to retrieve shampoo samples, or of Courteous’ own innumerable rescues from neighborhood hoods at the trained teeth of the dog, which died unattended at the end of its chain, barking at a lark.  Soon we were looking into lunar reefs, navigating purple hazards, tooting creatureless shells that stank of brine, yodeling and crooning at top speed over the liquid undulance from which we had spilled out of bed as hubris-stuffed dollops of kaleidoscopic slime.\n<\/p>\n
\nAfter an afternoon freshened by our escapades, we had wound up in a luminous little cove where the deep bottom sand pulsed blue in time to the lulling swells;  monstrous turtles frolicked and played at semaphores with their four fleshly underwater wings.  Our original excitement had quieted to occasional oohs by this time, and we were content to drift between measureless sea and measureless sky, or in and out of a fluttering sleep, trailing lazy limbs in warm sodawater.\n<\/p>\n
\nThere are rare moments, fugitive instants, that glitter with a recollected condensation when our span is wished up upon us again in sullen reverie, and time collapses like a circus tent down an unshakable centerpole, the radiant nodule of a nodding minute or sparked millisecond, reducing rounded shadows of events to mere flats, bringing us flush with the twilit distant past, erasing accreted differences between our current selves (a treacherous fiction) and the doomed, slavish selves that we were, which, although they seemed complete at the time, intense, capable, undecided, they must now repeat our ruinous film upon command, decisionless ghosts dissolving halfway up the same stairs forever, kicking out the stilts that keep our feet dry and separate us from the marmoreal, miasmic, mammalian mire of memory, reducing a vibrant now to a sanded then, collapsing space.  Or, actually, I suppose, such magnetic moments enlarge us from our vague potentials and unrealized wholes into exact fractions, infinite in their compactness as failed stars–as opposed to the puny view which history with its crooked stack of flashcards affords.  Well, however it is, one such zinging instant was about to descend upon me then, nine years old and in a boat, watching clods deform and defoam above me, my tingling hand grounded in live currents.\n<\/p>\n
\nBut what if this sacred event were merely baptized in tired bathwater and Mr. Bubble? So what! In my mind the constellation of differing blues takes on the fixed geometry of a premonition, a blue five of hearts licked to fate’s crinkled forehead, pale sky, robust blue trunks warmly pasted against me, neutral blue bench plank before me, hopeless blue cloud-shadow diffusing and re-fusing all around my lightly flecked, heavily targeted, heavenly blur-blue eye.  I can see now that I was ready then for the unknown next.  There was a faint wrinkle-wrinkle sound in the water.  Coeur-hearted Courteous, I think, snorted, while stately King squinted with sleek regality at the horizon from his pose on the prow.  I still had my bright eye on the everlasting.  And then, out of nowhere, out of an illusionist’s hidden hat, out of the invisible ocean, it came.\n<\/p>\n
\nHaving no taste, or, at most, a fading aftertaste, or burp’s hint, for the bilious and overblown, I suppose that I should simply present my phenomenon, have done with it, and click to the next slide.  Very well.  enough ghoulish suspense.  Dimensions: twenty-four feet if an inch from blunt front to whiplike stern, side to side another shadowy twenty perhaps.  General shape: flapping diamond.  Skin: slick, oiled oil in shaded, rough under magnification.  Mouth: a surreptitious incision invisible when not gaping wide enough to swallow in one convulsive gulp a pumpkin the size of a human head.  Gills (for it was, indeed, a creature of the sea I met): a terraced series of similar incisions, following the graceful flow of line of the calculate-in-the-direction-of-infinity sign in calculus (a lower-case italicized f minus its horizontal stripe).  Have you got these disparate parts firmly in hand, or in mind, rather? Very well.  Toss them and think gestalt, gestalt.  Has the monster materialized from your foam, or is the puzzle still jumbled? Oh, all right, all right, quit tugging my sleeve, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you.\n<\/p>\n
\nLike Botticelli’s Aphrodite, flying from the hysterical slalom of the sleeping sea-soma, this awful shadow emerged, breaking the cursive crest of its sheltering wave, and sledded, an awesome twenty-four-by twenty of sea-beast, no more than four feet over our rickety deck.  I recognized it instantly as the sweaty, living version of several smaller miniatures (all fearsomely detailed) I had seen printed dinkily in my well-thumbed Field Guide to Sea Lore.  There it was called, in the all-caps title to its own article, THE MANTA-RAY OR DEVILFISH, by Wally Stevedore.  The poor, lost fellow, out of his supportive element, seemed to sag and waggle a bit at his skinny tips as he loomed for that brief, hovering moment above the boat.  Was there terror and fire? White cowardice in our young hearts and rubbery limbs? There was shade and sky, a shuttle of bright and dark that I now replay, a dripping instrument of the miraculous followed, in its pop-up appearance, by clinging tendrils of stage-smoke.\n<\/p>\n
\nAnd then, poof! it was gone.  The apparition dissolved that, probably, the tuna sandwich on Courteous’ breath (combined with our raw boy-smells) had called at a stroke from the zeus-azure depths.  The placated boat, still sluggishly full of gas, wobbled like a robin’s egg cradled in the inquisitive palm of a girl with glasses;  this palm was attached, I am, sure, to my ghost half-sister who never quite managed to get born, but who I have always had, in my head, the most stubbornly glowing image of (nimbused or coronaed by a lucky sunset touching her hair with its radiant bubble).  My heart, wrecked and wronged by nine years of wear and tear and care, seemed, for the moment, drained and spacious, a tapped swamp relieved of its dreams.  One could still see the awkward shapes of clouds going divinely by.\n<\/p>\n
\nHere the hesitant gesture offered by the dissipating trunk of a swollen elephant-cloud uncurling towards a shy mouse- or grouse-cloud retreating into a misty skidmark.  There, the missed clasps and forgotten hugs of busy vapors, demonstrating as in a classroom nature’s purposeless stridency and demand for estrangement.  But closer to me than even those immaculate splotches, closer, and nearer and dearer, was the monstrous darkness that had hovered for its soaked moment over my soul, sea-musty and heavenly, silent and wet.  And there it still hovered over my sunken kid’s chest, skin intact, unlike the one I had gaped at later, less willingly spreadeagled, and which I had taken an older, grotesque interest in, as if peering at myself in a queer mirror, dead an vivisected on a dock in Miami.  Huddled together as we were under that cauled shadow, my monster and me, I myself having been almost bundled off into sleep by the sea’s queasiness, I felt, or think that I remember having felt, some gelatinous tentacle of the thing’s being reach down towards me out of that black diamond, and something slippery in me leap up.\n<\/p>\n
\nAlso, and this I have concealed until the penultimate minute, I had spotted, in that torpid solstice, folded in our communal awning of shadow, up in the instantaneous blackness that had come whispering out of the sea to bury us (or save us, as I once overheard in some terrorist ceremony at a Satanic Church revivalist meeting held, covertly, in my own basement–without my consent or foreknowledge–from my pinched position behind the umber altar where I had been laying ant traps, and stuck under an inverted cross where the carved blood flooded up), and in the backward abyss of memory still spot, the slow, maddened revolution of the great creature’s moist sustaining eye.\n<\/p>\n
\n1991<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
EPIGRAPHS Seas and seasons on the edge of wetness “Either you decide to stay in the shallow end … or you go out in the ocean.” –Christopher Reeve .. all that we are destined to know, that the water is cold and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far. ~~Jim Harrison TIDAL POOL Look […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1745],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deepening-sea","category-1745-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7374,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5541\/revisions\/7374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}