Listen to this poem read by Leslie Norris

1

A little sea
       in the night
   ran its inch of tide
about the bole of the peach tree,

hesitated,
    came fawning to my door,
        cringed,
           fell away.

Its small crests,
   its ebb,
      broke my sleep.

2

A little sea
       was running in the desert.
It came in
   under the edges of the breeze,
a true sea,
     sharpening the air with salt,
         filling hourly through the night.

It remembered white ships,
   clippers out of China
       freighted with tea and roses,
          sea-swans
    holding gales in their wings,
storms off the coast of fragrant Spain, snarling.

   It hurled
      against my walls
          its gathering whips and drums,
              dropped away,
its throat rattling with pebbles.

3

I got up,
   opened my door
      to this unbelievable sea

      My yard was lit by silent moonlight.
Parched grasshoppers chirrupped in the ditches.

4

But still the sea broke
   on the beaches of my ears.

       My skull was a shell
    holding the noisy tides
Pouring unseen over the desert.

5

A man is moon to his own sea -
he draws it after him,
like a dog it follows him
the days of his life.

All that night I heard the sea make
and ebb, a sea formed
of grains of remembered oceans,
fed by rains and rivers

of days I had finished with.
It carried old sticks in its mouth.
In the morning a tides detritus,
twigs, small round stones, a can,

lay in uneven lines
on the charred grass.

6

A hermit thrush sings for me
in dry arroyos its liquid note.
I have heard in the desert
unrecognized birds, charmers,

lift up their single whistles,
long separated, distant,
purified by distance, among
the grassless dunes.

I have thought them calling me.
I have heard the voices
of an invisible sea
whispering with boys'

voices, heard in its dry waves
the pattering of boys' feet
through the built canyons
of the past. I have heard

such singing. The mocking-bird
has sung for me. Each day
the waters of that sea
are rising blindly to the full.