Poem: Henri Cole

                


       Beach Walk

I found a baby shark on the beach.

Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.

Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.

The ocean had scraped his insides clean.

When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,

like black water. Later, I saw a boy

aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.

Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us--

not quite emotion. I could see the pink

interior flesh of his eyes. "I got lost. Where am I?"

he asked, like a debt owed to earth.

I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.

We fall, we fell, we are falling. Nothing mitigates it.

The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.



Henri Cole is one of those poets I read consistently...he falls into that category of "poets I feel I have to defend as soon as I mention them"..like Louise Gluck, another poet whose writing I admire. I think with Gluck people often miss the wry nature of the uses she finds for past poetries, or the sardonic wit of her poems. I think people read her as a confessionalist, which I find rather funny. I think there is such a thing as a "glorious anachronism" in literature, and I think both Cole and Gluck are successful examples of that...at times...other times they speak perfectly in the present moment, perhaps out of pique or dudgeon. Or should I more precisely say poets like Cole and Gluck make terms like "anachronism" moot by finding moments outside of (cultural) time...(and cultural time is the only kind critics seem to understand, poor things!) Poets like Cole and Gluck are usually busy in Prospero-like fashion dispelling time, defending the island. I want to write more at length about the book from which this poem derives, Blackbird and Wolf, and the one that immediately preceded it, Middle Earth. Both these books have rewarded continual rereading for a long time now.