So the next three poems I had a little more fun with, I can say.
These are very fresh.
They're still damp.
I talked about this in the class that I visited, actually,
in Claire's class.
And I talked about giving myself assignments.
And I was on Cape Cod.
And I was teaching in the morning.
In the afternoons, I had time off.
And so I would go to the beach.
And as I walked down the beach, I
would give myself the assignment to come up
with a first line of a poem.
And then when I found my spot on the beach,
I would sit down and write that poem.
And these next three poems are ones that I did.
They don't really have titles.
The first poems were composed.
And so the beach figures into these as you read them.
And I've given them a not so great title.
But it's from Herring Cove, number 1.
Just a gloss, I refer to a film, Luchino Visconti's film
of Death in Venice, in which the character of Aschenbach
goes into a great decline.
It's a fabulous film.
From Herring Cove.
The dead are so much easier to love.
They don't appear uninvited in your yard, ask for favors,
get mad.
Instead, they are a bit like the seal
I barely glimpsed at the beach.
No one with me.
So mine alone.
Black head cresting from a wave.
And so big.
I thought it was a serpent, or a small whale.
But no, just a seal just revealed
emerging from its vast, unknowable realm of wet salt,
tide's force.
My first time in Venice, I hardly
ever knew what I was looking at except for lunch.
Sometimes I had an eerie hunch I was being followed
as I went up one wet little bridge,
then down, taking my slick, and clueless walk to some church.
Later, I would lie in a humid and narrow bed.
My face melting like Visconti's Aschenbach, my mind sketching
in a stranger waiting for me next to the green fetid waterway
downstairs.
Who cares if ghosts exist?
They're still dead.
Only our attention keeps them fed.