Here's another excerpt from the long, multi-part poem "St. Lucia Landing." On visits there, it was a life lived outside. The hot weather in January and February, typically when my family would be there, drew us to the beach and sea. Inside, the house was airy and open with tropical trees and plants around and colorful birds landing on the kitchen table and window ledges when the shutters were pulled aside.
St. Lucia Landing (excerpt 2)
130
Unbothered by foraging doves
And long-beaked tremblers and crows,
With their fierce feet, the long-tailed critter,
Size of a large chipmunk, dragged its ass
Uphill, jaws clamped on a hunk of bread,
Not moving like a standard rat.
131
In eleventh century-China, Wei T’ai told us,
“Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling.
It should be precise about the thing and reticent
About the feeling, for as soon as the mind
Responds and connects with the thing, the feeling
Shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply
Into us. If the poet presents directly feelings which
Overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger
As an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot
Start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and
Tapping in time, far less strengthen morality
And refine culture, set heaven and earth
In motion and call up the spirits.”
132
Halfway into the bay
A wave rears like a white
Chess knight, mane flaring,
Or a pumped-up seahorse riding
Its back-fin or even a sky-blue skunk
With foamy stripe and bush-tail,
Parading just like that,
Then gone.
—Paul Marion (c) 2018