By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, August 13, 2006
At this time of year, many people go to the shore: because it is cool, because there are good things to do and eat there, and because there is something fascinating about the ocean and the things that live in it or near it. Peter Balakian made a poem, "Thoreau at Nauset" (dedicated to Hyatt and Louise Waggoner), by adapting and rearranging some of Henry David Thoreau's words from Thoreau's book Cape Cod . The poem represents Thoreau's peculiar character, and through that personality the scene also suggests a particular state of mind, perhaps universal, where the mind is somehow both concentrated and relaxed:
I watched the kelp in particular,
spread on the sand
like some homespun.
Earweed, tangle, devil's-
apron, sole-leather, ribbon weed;
it's a con artist.
Umbilical in the bubbles.
Unsnarled by the tide.
When it catches the sun,
it's a budding anemone.
I took the first chance
to whittle some up.
It could've been sea-otter's-cabbage,
which can hit a hundred feet.
Strange wide softness.
Root-like holdfast.
I cut the stipe.
Felt its rubber.
Pulled apart branching stalks
and wrapped the blades'
still puffing bladders
around my wrists.
Then sun spilled like gilt
on onionskin.
With a match and small twigs
I made a small fire
to cook my clam.
Tough and sweet.
A little water and some bread,
and I'd have called it a feast.
*
Sat at the Charity House
till dusk.
No windows or sliding shutters.
I knelt by a knothole in the door.
Cold air moved through the straw-
stuffed clapboards.
My eye drifted in the quiet dark.
The floor was breathing.
I stood there light as hay
dilating
my skin -- a man-o'-war's
after a sculler slits it
and the ink spills out.
The writer here is both alert and still: kneeling by a knothole in the dark beachfront charity house, feeling "light as hay" and "dilating" in some tactile way while visual awareness "drifted in the dark." That quiet, rapt attention has a lot to do with writing: The sunlight spills like "gilt/ on onionskin" -- which I take to mean both the actual skin of an onion and the thin paper named after it. And Balakian's final line, again using the verb "spill," brings Thoreau's astringent kind of whimsy to the writer's urge or need to write.
(Peter Balakian's poem "Thoreau at Nauset" is from his book "June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974 -2000." HarperCollins. Copyright 2001 by Peter Balakian. By permission of HarperCollins.)
View all comments that have been posted about this article.