In a poem called Ballydavid Pier--
Ballydavid Pier is--
Ballydavid is a small village in County Kerry in Ireland.
It's in an Irish-speaking area.
It's a most beautiful, desolate, poverty-stricken,
full-of-history kind of place.
And on one wonderful summer afternoon there,
something that I saw floating in the harbor of Ballydavid Pier,
and which I couldn't identify for quite some time,
became the subject for this poem.
"Noon.
The luminous tide climbs through the heat,
covering gray shingle.
A film of scum searches first among litter, cloudy with--
I remember-- life.
Then crystal-clear shallows cool on the stones,
silent with shells and claws, white fish bones.
Farther out, a bag of flesh, fetus of goat or sheep,
wavers below the surface.
Allegory forms of itself--
the line of life creeps upward replacing
one world with another.
The welter of its advance sinks down into clarity.
Slowly, the more foul monsters of loss digest.
Small monster of true flesh brought forth somewhere
in bloody confusion and error, and flung into bitterness,
blood washed white.
Does that structure satisfy?
The ghost tissue hangs unresisting
in allegorical waters, lost in self-search,
a swollen blind brow humbly crumpled over budding limbs,
unshaken by the spasms of birth or death.
The Angelus-- faint bell-notes from some church
in the distance tremble over the water.
It is nothing.
The vacant harbor is filling, it will empty.
The misbirth touches the surface and glistens like quicksilver."