Masters

The deeper the sea becomes, the bluer,
The more faithful a translation it becomes
Of the sky. But water interprets the wind
With too much license, and breaks loose.

As a child, I once filled a tub with water,
And blew with all my might of breath on the water
To inflict it with the worst weather possible,
Taking for my model one of the four cheek-busting
Winds I had seen in the maps of old geography books.

The ripples leveled as soon as I stopped
To catch my breath. I was, of course, crestfallen.
But, I cried to my mind, it is only wind!
It is hardly anything! Why is it so powerful?

Yet a steady breeze, just stiff enough
To make your gazing eyes hurt to brim tears
Is quite capable of hauling in the surf.
And notice that it is not the wind
That will blow you down. The combers
Will come to tackle you first.

The wind is a subtle master. Yet, perhaps,
It is altogether inadvertent. It merely hums,
It merely whistles, yet what it suggests,
Like a hypnotist’s is taken with utmost seriousness
By the water--that thereupon gathers in
All that power, unleashes it, and goes berserk.

Look at a globe that maps the winds—
The swirls and whorls, the arrows that fly
Every which way but off--it is the circular emblem
Of bewilderment. Never allow it to evoke
Wild leaps of water. It will make you sea-sick.

Paolo’s and Francesca’s hell was wind, cyclical,
Swarming with blown human leaves adrift
In the cyclone of eternal turning.
Waves have a heavier, more massive language,
Hewing closer to the literal, the actual, the flesh—
Bastardy the wind may never have meant to sire.
Wave has a will of its own, a freedom, power.
All caution is lost in the translation