The Sea
The sense
of smell, they say,
which I lost
half my life ago,
is the
most nostalgic sense of all.
I couldn’t
smell a skunk
in a
closet. But we don’t
keep our skunks
there, nor
skeletons
as far as I know.
One night
when the pups barked
out back
and, in my pajamas,
I went to
investigate I saw
a plume of
tail. I towed the pups
out of
reach, kenneled them
for the
night. What will
Nita say?
when I get back
in bed, I
wondered, if that
pole cat had
already detonated
in the
weeds. It could be
a rude
awakening. But he
was a
young skunk, like
the pups,
neither knowing
what was expected
of them yet.
When I
read Banville’s
The Sea, with its olfactory
tour de
force and its tugs
at
memory, I hark back
to one
morning I sat
on an Oahu shore, the trades
blew in against
my face.
The
detritus was fresh and
pungent,
like the plumeria lei
and the
kiss from the girl who draped
it over
my head at the airport
when we
landed. “Aloha,”
she said, “Welcome to our Island ,”
And in
the back of my mind
I can
smell and still hear
the
pounding of the sea.
—Donnell
Hunter
5 January
2012
We
have Temple
In your personal experience with the sea you allude obliquely to Bainville's "The Sea." After talking to you last night, I've decided once again that I have indeed read more books than you and have read them better than most, but though you have read fewer, you have read them better--and always have. Any poem about the sea works for me because, I guess it's primal in our own ritual drama and in our veins and arteries, even if the sea flows more slowly now.
ReplyDeleteOld Son:
ReplyDeleteI don't know that I've read them better, but with all the things you have read there may be a dilution factor.
My sea life includes Oahu's north shore for two years with a walk almost every morning looking for glass balls and some paintings I did when I was first starting to paint in oils.
Then there was the Gulf of Mexico for three years in Veracruz with many morning walks with Nita.
Plus some summer workshops in Port Townsend where:
I made a covenant with the sea:
keep only one pebble a day.
Our friendship could last that way
forever. But today I carried three
a mile before parting with the green.
Gulls kept silent flying in and out
our circle of fog. Light held tight.
Freighters answered the lighthouse horn.
After a long time the tide shifted
back a step, and the amber agate lost
its sheen. I took the red conglomerate--
its taste of salt and smell of driftwood.
Both the the sea and I today were hard to please,
each wave breaking with a whisper, “Choose.”
—Donnell Hunter
"Pebbles,"
published in Rio Grande Review and in my Honeybrook Press chapbook, Annals of Natural History, 1989