Joanna Klink/Sea by Dusk

Sea by Dusk

Comes to gather you from clocks and says be moon,
be progress. Gathers the bitter fact of chance and says
change in every way. Depending on the harvest,

a sadness glassed in autumn, depending on the sea.
Shatters the lullaby, lush and drugged, that would settle
in the downcast reaches. You who bear the light in you

bear the deep compass, unending corrosion,
an irreparable white meadow. Gather what voyage you can,
a sound far into water, susurrous in the array of salt

and drifting sunlight, what is left for us to live. Below water
or close above, rhythms emptied in the flutter of Pacific,
without limit, a human sound breaking hard against this air,

endure, says become what you can in the summer fluency of waves.
Sleep, saline, gathers the currents of blue driftwood,
says a hymnal loose with eiderdown and light—

and comes to prize you in the hour of your late undertaking,
your new and precise fear. Listen, lean, that you might feel,
in the warm blurring of waves, the opening and closing of flowers,

a circadian call that pulls all desolation toward clearing,
be ready, be shirred, task of light, a cadence of star
and constancy, change, dropping far in pressured water,

sails of shadow change in every way. As in the halls of night
the swallows gather up whole acres of past error,
vision into vision, printed in the last coral light spilled out

across the tides, your arms, gathered and withstood
in such arcades of stars and sleeping fish, within, without,
pulling near—do I know you—issued in calligraphies of brine

on darkness, turn, return. We are drifting out of phase,
lost, calendar-sprung, and feel the wings slanting through air
above these fleeting museums of the sea, held

within a single note that moves in pain, pattern, scarcity
and abundance, abide, turn and return, some small, far happiness—
and the nocturne grows within each drowsy marine creature,

rope, tack, slowing muscle of the heart, depending on the tides,
depending on the air, a perfect mammal stillness
beneath all flights of caution, the net cast far into

space, who, clock, stopclock, falling lace, beautiful and slow
across the warming skin, in the slipping borders, your body,
shall be safe, unscheduled beyond the seatorn cemetery,

gracious fields, the gardens, as in a true response
to daylight, here, unearthed in cooling water,
full of suffering, mirrors, moving countries

of fish and floating grass, your hopes, receding
terror, recognize you, it says, no loneliness, no more
loneliness, open, it says, your arms.

—Joanna Klink

Joanna Klink is author of They Are Sleeping. She teaches at the University of Montana.

Originally published in the April/May 2003 issue of Boston Review

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