Fog, wind,
rocks, fir trees —
The blank face of eternity indifferently burns.
Two men, one young, one middle-aged,
Sit Japanese style, meditating,
Staring out at the North Atlantic.
The June sunrise is joy exploding
And gilding the steel water.
There is no big explosion yet.
It is toward the end of the nineteenth century,
The proper century, and the men,
Who are wealthy and idle, are worried
And ill at ease.
The umbrageous gulls shrill mercilessly.
A crab dawdles by the two gentlemen.
Waves slap and slam and slither.
The men hear and see and sniff
The salt, agnostic air.
They are men of uncommon attainments,
Tutors and tutees,
Connoisseurs of language, boats, prints,
Glazes, cloudless June days —
And yet there is nothing to attain.
Water runs over rocks
And falls back into itself.
Spray hovers, sparkles and dissolves
In one unaccented second.
Sand trickles through fine fingers.
They sit and look at the sea
And conjure up other centuries
And other men who walked more
Purposefully through crueler worlds,
Who orated and argued and thieved.
They hike for hours over boulders and
Through thick spruce woods.
As Yankees, they are too habitually
Vigorous to be truly effete.
It's rather that the iron in their souls is slag
Because they suspect they have no souls
And are no more than waves, the groping
And tumult and final lassitude
Of some happenstance of energy.
They are arbitrary.
It will be a good year for blueberries.
Morning after morning the sky shouts with light.
The two men sit precisely as
They were instructed in the city of Kyoto
And as they have read in certain rare books.
"Whatever are you doing, George?"
A mother on the veranda asks impertinently
And her son, a handsome man for whom
Cities were built and fortunes lodged,
Only smiles faintly, says nothing, and,
With his hands pressed together, bows.
anon