The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell. Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue. The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale Gaped on nothing but sand on either side. The bone tastes its own absence, and its essence Is found, and lost, and found again, and again lost. The shark's jawbone that ground rock and flint into dust And sucked the shark's teeth, fossilized, from the rock And ground the teeth up also: The shark's jaw, Like a section of white seafloor, quivers, And the rock moves back. The tongue of the waves, The widow's tongue, the want-bone, lies in the quicksand And at the tide's low reaches into the ledge caves Where aeons ago your heel-print sundialled The golden atoms of the radium ore. When the heel was a part of the weather's report And the weather was one with the seabird's cry, The tide was a wind. The wind lifted the mashed Spray from the tops of the waves, and the flying Surf, like the beard plucked from an old man's chin, Streaming backward, was white. The gulls, blown inland, Backward, or forward, were turned like scraps Of paper thrown away. The want-bone split And its marrow, the sea, ran out. Salt dried, The entrails modeled a trout stream, screaming Down the mountain, the heart its stone, its finger The curled fiddlehead, its spine the reedy Backbone of the bogland where Crusoe turned His nimble, precarious pirouette, A choreography of mud and tree-stumps. The want-bone still trembles, far from the shore, Shuddering with each wave yet always there, A part of the earth, part of the ocean, A part of the human body, reaching Into the world's desire for permanence. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...BRUCE AND THE SPIDER by BERNARD BARTON 1914: 2. SAFETY by RUPERT BROOKE THE BELLS OF SAN BLAS by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW KATHLEEN O'MORE by GEORGE NUGENT REYNOLDS UPON A SPIDER CATCHING A FLY by EDWARD TAYLOR |