246 PA RT T W O
Its curve does not break,
though it looks as if it will,
like the head of the dune-
shaped wave advancing...Flux takes shape here, waves can seem still and dunes may move. As Coleridge
said of a stream rushing against a rock, throwing up a constant foam-rose con-
stantly spent, “It is the life that we live.” Thanks to hyphens, “wave-shaped
dune” and “dune-shaped wave” interplay in poetry as in fact. Sand and sea,
still and moving, losing and sustaining, make up a whole.
Facing the endlessly renewing ocean, the “overwhelming whale of water,
mover and shaper,” Swenson has mortal leanings. “I am pulled forward /...
into her rough insane / annihilating grasp.” She watches every “dark curl” of
surf with its “hollows empty”: “One of them is mine / and gliding forward,
gaping wide.”
Before Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, Swenson’s last letter had ended, “Please
know that I love you—always will.. .” Her Bishop elegy, “In the Bodies of
Words,” starts as it must, outdoors.
Tips of the reeds silver in sunlight. A cold wind
sways them, it hisses through quills of the pines.
Sky is clearest blue because so cold.Even—or especially—in grief, music persists, in a poem’s body language: sun-
light, pines, and thin i-sounds, silver tips, wind hissing through quills. Then
shock that the news didn’t reach her on earth. “Why was there / no tremor of
the ground or air?” Then this:
I walk the shore. Scraped hard as a floor by the wind.
Screams of terns. Smash of heavy waves. Wind rips
the corners of my eyes. Salty streams freeze on my face.Ocean salt blends with tears yet she won’t, not now, foist feelings on the natural
world. Her words, however harsh, bring the land ’s end alive, its touch, sight,
sound, and cold taste.
“But vision lives!” Swenson promises her fellow-poet, “lives in bodies of
words.” “Ocean is gray again today,” nothing to see
Except, far out, low over sluggish waves, a long
clotted black string of cormorants trails south.Cormorant, “raven of the sea,” ravenous. Their string “slips beyond the ho-
rizon. Vanished. / / But vision lives, Elizabeth,” in that dark vanishing string
that ’s just visible.