The Sea One Morning

Tried on one morning the sea like a pair of trousers,
put on the smell,
the smell of low tide,
felt revulsion at waves of flies kicked up
from dead fish and kelp and the wind in grasses
that blows small peppery grains of sand like an acid chaff,

and saw
how a ship could sink like a plow in sod
or swing battered like a gate off its hinges
and leave fewer tracks than a mouse on a roof of slate;

and got to see white water and its darker phases
like the great horned owls,
night hunters that drift in silence
to sift out sheep after sleep falls like snow on a meadow,

and began to know great fear and a need for holes
and grew sick of the constant motion of a field in storm,

and wished for a maple limp on an afternoon
and a rain crow crying for rain,
the only waves, the washes a cicadas kicks,
the only tides,
the tides thrown back by the shuttling crab-like machines.