THE OLD MIND AND THE SEA

I

The earth's high child tugs molten tides about.
Tidal fire, surging.

Comes cloud, boiling thick, viscous.
Comes rain. Rain. Rain. The torn scar brims.

Granules of landsalt grit down to a coolant sea.
And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

It is a miracle chemistry, and it holds.
The earth's high child tugs saline tides about.

Life streams. Diatoms. Protozoa.
Cells coalesce. Life streams.

Tentacled weed anchors the shallows.
Slugs with fins walk out on everdead rock.

Life streams. Cells coalesce.
Fins into legs. The terrible teeth of lizards.

Sea to land. Again to sea.
Cells coalesce. Life streams.
    Landward.
    Seaward.

Tidal life.
A streaming tide of life from, through, to, from mother-sea.

Gentling, cruel, nurturant, indifferent.
Mother-sea.

II

The sea is the primary mind's spirit level -
It holds the surging physics trim.

The sea is the knowing mind's spirit level,
and the planet's.

The sea is the mind's spirit leveller.

III

We are aeons bound on trailing chains.
They gather us in with plankton, albatross, whale...

We bled from the sea.
On the sheer keel of science we flow back.

We flow back, armed and curious.
We engage with invisible tides.

We reap what we do not sow.
Impossibly vast, it eludes us.

We are alien. Poor things of air.
Alien this fecund swirl. Fish out of water.

We offer the tainted fruit of our enterprise.
We swing the species around.

We simplify.
We make turbid what was clear.
    Much is gone.
    Much is going.
But we swing the species about.
    Simplify things.
    Thus are they known.

IV

The mind wants boundaries.
It sees a mantle without shape, a-stir
    with a great probe of life,
    life surfacing, flexing, burgeoning fit to burst.
The mind wraps it the planet round,
    one vast molecular swarm,
    swollen, uncontained with life's first spring.
It is without bounds, says the mind,
    and the mind demands beginnings,
    ends.

But here the sea-heat dwindles,
    and light, there, is lost
    to the dark in the sea canyon's heart,
    and currents shape the difference here,
    and there nutrients pool and cluster.
Life changes, fractures, seeks an elemental niche –
and sea-space takes a bounded form.

V

Do I go too far? Ask what should not be asked?

I would know your beginnings,
    mother-of-life, spirit leveller,
    giver of all and taker of all.

And your ends.

Do I forget myself?

© Pete Hay