Algebraic Sestina for the Ocean

October 15, 2005: Daytona Beach, Florida, at sunrise.

"Sestina is a poetry form that sounds too much like algebra to me."
-- Colleen, in a comment accompanying this entry.

I saw that after I had followed the link from her homage to the ocean to Sunday Scribblings and had already decided to join in with an ocean entry.

I thought: Why not do both?....

Algebraic Sestina for the Ocean

To undertake Pythagorean feats,
Or write about subtractions in the sand?
I sit, Muse cleaved in two by bladed thoughts:
The sea in one, the other stirred by math.
Quadratic ebb and flow, perhaps, a line
And then a grid, new theorems taking form.

I've sat on rock walls, mesmerized by form,
The ocean glass, then froth. Watched diving feats
Of pelicans and gulls. A jetty line
Breaks water from its anchor in the sand,
Grows slippery in spume, stones piled in math
That measures splash, a road of dammed-up thoughts.

On calmer nights I float on buoyed thoughts,
The ocean of my brain a shapeless form
Whose neurons spark a phosphorescent math,
As though the patterns there were schoolgirl feats
Awaiting pencil tests, my gritty sand
Small points of reason straining toward a line.

I cannot fight the straight horizon line
That keeps its distance from my tide-pulled thoughts.
What drops have formed my soul? What grains of sand?
What salt-encrusted air affords me form
That twists me toward imaginary feats
Whose physics fall away? Clear pools of math

Dry up into the simpler shells of math:
The chambered Nautilus, its life a line
Curved into mortal coil. No startling feats
But life and death, the transience of thoughts.
A spark of poem that struggles toward its form.
These scattered words dull irritants. Like sand.

So let's start over. Here's a bucket, sand.
We're in a world where all we know of math
Is counting toes while piglets take their form.
Sharp bird tracks sink a many-crisscrossed line
As surf rolls over mud to clear our thoughts
And we begin anew. Our greatest feats

Not feats of formulae. My tattered thoughts
Refuse to walk a line, or take a form.
Let me be sand. My heart will do the math.


Dorchester Bay, Massachusetts. After a heavy snowfall one winter, Mary and I snowshoed up and down Carson Beach.

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