Ground Swell

Is nothing real but when I was fifteen,

Going on sixteen, like a corny song?

I see myself so clearly then, and painfully--

Knees bleeding through my usher's uniform

Behind the candy counter in the theater

After a morning's surfing; paddling frantically

To top the brisk outsiders coming to wreck me,

Trundle me clumsily along the beach floor's

Gravel and sand; my knees aching with salt.

Is that all I have to write about?

You write about the life that's vividest.

And if that is your own, that is your subject.

And if the years before and after sixteen

Are colorless as salt and taste like sand--

Return to those remembered chilly mornings,

The light spreading like a great skin on the water,

And the blue water scalloped with wind-ridges,

And--what was it exactly?--that slow waiting

When, to invigorate yourself, you peed

Inside your bathing suit and felt the warmth

Crawl all around your hips and thighs,

And the first set rolled in and the water level

Rose in expectancy, and the sun struck

The water surface like a brassy palm,

Flat and gonglike, and the wave face formed.

Yes. But that was a summer so removed

In time, so specially peculiar to my life,

Why would I want to write about it again?

There was a day or two when, paddling out,

An older boy who had just graduated

And grown a great blonde moustache, like a walrus,

Skimmed past me like a smooth machine on the water,

And said my name. I was so much younger,

To be identified by one like him--

The easy deference of a kind of god

Who also went to church where I did--made me

Reconsider my worth. I had been noticed.

He soon was a small figure crossing waves,

The shawling crest surrounding him with spray,

Whiter than gull feathers. He had said my name

Without scorn, just with a bit of surprise

To notice me among those trying the big waves

Of the morning break. His name is carved now

On the black wall in Washington, the frozen wave

That grievers cross to find a name or names.

I knew him as I say I knew him, then,

Which wasn't very well. My father preached

His funeral. He came home in a bag

That may have mixed in pieces of his squad.

Yes, I can write about a lot of things

Besides the summer that I turned sixteen.

But that's my ground swell. I must start

Where things began to happen and I knew it.

                     -from Questions for Ecclesiastes