Classic Poem

How is it with you, Aunt Harle,
in Wareham where the herring gulls
rake in over roofs, or reefs, of stores,
with their long grey sea-wings and sea-
voices and whitecap hulls? Of course,
I could phone down, or fly; but ei-
ther immediately annuls
a pleasant immensity—
the years and the hundreds of miles
between me and my thoughts—or between
one thought and another: That I,
far away to the west, should smell the sea—
cold, salt, clamflat, gasoline. . . .

What is it, here among hills—the keen
air, maybe, and the flying brook
begetting their annual Ishmael?
But no. I think it may be a book
I read lately, an odd
volume on history -and-psychoanal-…
But leave the word there, on as good
a break for sense as for typography. . . .

A book to make Man hang his head
and elevate his anus. I—
(from the other end of the genus, I
hope)—am shoresick, thinking of you
and the sea's shine in your windows,
the nearness of that Thalassa,
its race in your blue glance
and white smile. . . . Wordsworth's child
is with us as well as Freud's—the top
and bottom of us, right?
What would the good doctor your husband—
whose thoughts, may we say, were bottomless—
have made of it,—this “special connection
between sublimation and anality”?

Hello

and ahoy anyway, Aunt Harle
to whose white clapboard, panes a-blur
with light off water, the old log
blew open again just now.
(And beyond it the herring- and laughing-gulls,
a crescent of a white sloop heeling
under its summer sailors …) I'm glad
you are there, glad of the distance. It's
a damned small diameter
they'd pucker us into otherwise,
these proctologists of the soul.