No One Can Stem the Tide. Jane Tyson Clement
as one of her sons remarked after her death on March 21 of this year, his mother was so routinely dismissive of her gifts that he never even thought of her as a writer: “She certainly never seemed to think of herself in that way.”
In a verse that laments the inadequacy of language to convey the stirrings of the soul, Jane writes:
Words are the symbols of a mind’s defeat,
they shape the hollow air with transient life,
and trick and twist; and make the spirit reel,
vanish like ember’s fire; devour and leave
brave husks, and echoes of lost majesties.
Such ironic frustration is an inescapable part of practicing the writer’s craft. But it is not the whole story. For if it is true (as it is often said) that a work of art bears the stamp of its creator, it must be that the creation of a poem involves the expenditure of love. And such love does have power, if only to alter the lens of the mind’s eye and thus open it to new ways of seeing. Whether such claims can be made for the verses in this book, only the reader can decide.
C.M.Z.
July 2000
I
The Sea
1
GIFT
The sea will follow me through all my years,
will lift my heart in song,
will quench my tears,
will lay benignant hands upon my head
at discontented whispers, sorrow led.
Death will find my body, hide it where
the ghastly shadows creep, all brown and sere;
will choke my singing voice,
will blind my eyes
to beauty which within the seasons lies,
the proofs of God, which fade and rise again,
restored by gentle fingers of His rain.
Yes, Death will find me.
Not immortal, I
who cling with earth-stained fingers
also die –
but not forever – no.
The sea will raise my song again,
remembering all my praise.
2
Gull, at the water’s edge
mirrored in shining sand,
sleek in the silver wind
blown from the land;
in the clear fall of dark
past the thin pools of tide
with the gray sanderlings
swift at his side.
Outward beyond the eye
reaches the solitude
out to the end of time
where the winds brood.
One with his element,
quiet, unquestioning,
still, when the spill of wave
scurries the sanderling.
Dusk, and the spell of sea,
tide smell and all the vast
air for his wings when he
rises at last.
3
MANASQUAN INLET I (1939)
Here to these rocks, not grown from the sand
of this shore, not spawn of this sea-edge,
the men have come, drawn by the storm wind,
the leap of spray, drawn by the sleek, deep
no-colored seethe of the water at evening,
drawn by the sure power of morning
down to this outpost, this strange ledge of life,
this channel of finite to infinite; here the men
gather; always their heads are turned seaward.
Between the great jetties of rocks the tides come
and roil and devour and are manacled.
Here the men sit, and watch the known water,
the known and familiar waters of inland;
river and cove where the heron has waded,
marsh where the kingfisher screamed his blue anger,
shallows and reedy lagoon where the huntsmen
have waited; these are the waters they know
and have lived from, these are the waters
that feed the great hunger of ocean;
now the need of the tide will carry them outward,
lost in the dark indefinable surge of the sea.
Watching the run of the tide, the dark river
of knowledge, outward to mystery, out
to be mingled and claimed, the men find a fragment
of patience, a portion of fearlessness,
watching the waters go fearlessly outward to death.
4
MANASQUAN INLET II (1991)
No one can stem the tide; now watch it run
to meet the river pouring to the sea!
And in the meeting tumult what a play
of waves and twinkling water in the sun!
Ordained by powers beyond our ken,
beyond all wisdom, all our trickery,
immutable it comes, it sweeps, it ebbs
and clears the filthiness and froth of men.
5
NOT IN THESE DAYS
Not now, but when it is too late for gladness
will we remember these days of sunlight
and the clear water
netted with shadows moving and golden.
We will remember then, and the cry of the gull
will echo within us – gull’s cry in the clean air.
There is no trace of an echo now – in these days –
for there is nothing here to send the cry back to us –
low water and high sky and the free air between –
Not now – but when it is too late for gladness.
6
THE INLAND HEART
The wind is singing on the sun-struck dunes;
eastward the wind blows, and the level sea
runs with shadows golden-green and dark;
and no gull cries nearby, but far away
where the black finger of the rocks is laid
the white wings flash, the voices flash, and far
across the moving stretch a white sail gleams.
Here I am lost, hedged in with hills and shade;
and