Catechism of the Sea
In those days, we accepted the spindrift
from the breakers, the glitter
On the high wings of birds as the bright
evidence of a life everlasting.
Corroboration arrives in the alliteration
of waves, a tender star or two
Clinging to the tassel-ends of heaven,
a cloud, light as our paper souls,
Cleaned and pressed like a Sunday suit. We were
given to the immaculate sands
The incomparable charity of the sky,
and in autumn, only minor
Disruptions of dust spun up at street corners,
the glint from mica and the foil
Of gum wrappers causing us to momentarily
close our eyes—as close as we came
To death, unrecognized there or in the storm
troughs spiking a slate-dark sea.
Our hearts were white as our uniform shirts,
as the wild fields of alyssum,
And I learned nothing of set theory and equations
scrawled across the blackboards
Was sent out to clap erasers, returning with the unequal
properties of silence and covered
In a powdered veil of chalk, happily, for years, taken
as I was with the wobbly grandeur
Of the blue. Now, so much lost, so much taken away
with the absolute gravity, grind
Spin and brine of every invisible law, phrases
fly out the window to no one,
More darkness recited among the stars.
whatever I’ve been talking about
No longer seems to be the point—the ocean
can’t breathe, the revisions
Of the past will never save us now. It’s all
a fog inside me, refusing to burn off,
To offer up the rote responses to the choruses
of salt testifying to nothing,
The nonsense it all comes to like the first
day of summer and school reports
For science torn from my binder and tossed
onto the winds, so help me.
Now alone, I see the clouds under sail,
embarking out there for a port
Where the air ends, where all that waits
for us is the heavy ringing of
The sea’s dull bells. Pick any five men
mumbling in their coast, drifting
On the cliff-side benches, an on-shore breeze
at their unmetaphysical throats
And see how many words of allegiance or joy
can be squeezed out at this late date.
Make something of the one palm tree whose green
fronds are comparatively glorious
And resist the graceless rip and under-tow—
it’s just that way with God.
Christopher Buckley is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor and memoirist. He earned his BA from St. Mary’s College, MA from San Diego State University, and MFA from the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including most recently Modern History (2008), Rolling the Bones (2010), White Shirt (2011), Back Room as the Philosopher’s Club (2014), and Star Journal: Selected Poems (2016).
With Gary Young he has edited the anthologies The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place (1999), Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poetry and Poetics from California (2008), and One for the Money: The Sentence as a Poetic Form (2013). With Christopher Howell, Buckley edited the volume Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees (2011). His books have been translated into sixteen foreign languages. He worked as a merchant seaman and White House speechwriter. He has written for many newspapers and magazines and has lectured in over 70 cities around the world.
Buckley has won numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Award to Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award, and the James Dickey Prize. He is professor emeritus at the University of California-Riverside.