Full Fathom Five

Full Fathom Five

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's

coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard,: far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrin-: kling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form: suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in: runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor: and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's: ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shin-: bones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;

You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.