Looking From Oregon
Earle Birney
“And what it watches is not our wars”
(Robinson Jeffers)
Far out as I can see
into the crazy dance of light
there are cormorants like little black eyebrows
wriggling and drooping
but the eye is out of all proportion
Nearer just beyond the roiling surf
salmon the young or the sperm-heavy
are being overtaken by bird’s neb
sealion’s teeth fisherman’s talon
The spent waters
flecks in this corner of the eyeball
falling past my friend and his two sons
where they straddle the groin’s head
collapse on the beach
after the long race
from where? perhaps from Tonkin’s gulf
on the bloodshot edge
There’s no good my searching the horizon
I’m one of those another poet saw
sitting beside our other ocean
I can’t look farther out or in
Yet up here in the wild parsnips and the wind
I know the earth is not holding
tumbles in body-lengths
towards thunderheads and unimaginable Asia
though below me on the frothy rocks
my friend and his two boys
do not look up from fishing
Florence, Oregon l964
Birney, Earle. “Looking from Oregon.” Memory No Servant. Trumansburg, NY: New, 1968. 50. Repr. in The Collected Poems of Earle Birney. Vol. 1. Toronto: McClelland, 1975. 56.
Reprinted with the permission of Wailan Low, executor of the estate of Earle Birney.