XVII

    ENIGMAS

You ask what the crab offers, between its claws of gold,
and I say: The sea will tell you.
You ask what the sea-squirt hopes for in its translucent bell.
What can it hope for?
I say that it waits on its time, as you do.
You question for whom the algal Macrocystis offers its embraces.
Unloose it, unloose it, in a certain ocean, and a certain time, that I know.
Though you turn, for my answer to the narwhal’s malicious ivory,
I say that you wait for a darker reply,
how the sea-unicorn suffered the lance.
It may be you question the halcyon’s plumage,
tremoring,
in the pure womb of the southern seas?
Now, on the crystalline house of the polyp you twine
new demands, threshing it to the husk?
You want to know the matter electric, caught on the forks of the deep?
The stalactite’s armour that extends as crystal?
The spear of the angler-fish, the music stretched-out
in the gulf, like a thread amongst waters?

I say to you that the ocean knows it, the life
of its circlings vast as the sands, pure and innumerable,
and between the red vine-clusters, time has brightened
the stone of the petals, the light of medusas,
and the branches are threshed in the web of the corals,
from the flowing horn’s infinite nacre.
I am the empty net that hangs,
beyond men, rendered dead by the shadowy waters,
fingers grown used to the triangle, measured
by the shy hemisphere of orange-flowers.

I came, like you, penetrating
the interminable starlight,
in the net of the self, in the night, and found naked self,
the sole catch, the fish noosed in the wind.