Ken Weisner
The Ocean as a Symbol of CompassionThe lantern fish of your desire, the prowling sharks,
the blood urchins, devil rays, perfect storms,
the inhuman, forbidding floor, its tangled wrecks and corpses,
infinite salt like so much cold steel,
and you, a bobbing cipher
in a Himalaya of waves,
in a Brobdingnagian vertigo so precipitous
you might as well be lost in space and time.
And then, to make matters worse,
the tender moorings, the shores
where love is made! Where life began!
The schoolchildren! The innocent at play!
Holy mother of obscene distances--mother of cold,
mother of dark, mother of death--perfect, compassionate one!
Kelp: Leaf and Bulb
Pendulum, plumb-line,
suspended or upended,
always ready to drift
to the bottom mud,
plant your salt seed.
You look lonely as a sperm,
magnified to the size of a fish!
But you are a bronze flower,
autumn-tinged with a dying green.Your bitter root, your brine
your taste of grass and sea:
this must be your exile-
broken off from the nape
of some sea goddess,
cast aside, landed on these shores.I recall my German father's
salty laughter and rough hug,
his exile toughness,
his mother stalk,
his tired body-
impending death.
Umbilicus, alien,
waving just under
the surface: leafy comet;
sweet nipple of fate!
Potent queen
from a forest of dark feeders!
You have come
from across the sea
with a fierce, unbreathing claw.
Bio:
Ken Weisner teaches writing and literature at De Anza Community College in Cupertino. He returns to Santa Cruz each night to sleep within the sound of the sea lions. He plays French horn and, on occasion, conch. His first book of poems, The Sacred Geometry of Pedestrians, was published by Hummingbird Press in 2002.
