Night Terror

And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws...
--Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are”

The yellow boat he steered around the bath
becomes the bed he mans across his sleep.

The scarf that wrapped and warmed him in the cold
becomes the serpent coiled in freezing waves.

The moon that filled the bathroom window sill
becomes the eye that rolls around the skulls

of many monsters in the night. The nocturne
framed and hanging on the landing wall

becomes the island lashed by waves. The row
of sponges on the bathroom window sill

becomes the row of figment-fattened foes:
the bull, the goat, the bird, the no-one knows.



Bournemouth Beach

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
--Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

The sea is calm tonight. Listen -- it seems
the eternal note of sadness has evaded us;
the drummer of Dover’s dirge has long since gone.
Where flung pebbles scraped a slow sorrow’s song,

the sand of Bournemouth beach is sifted slower
still, and silently. Love, let us be for one another
all that the poet wished we would: for joy, for love,
for light, for certitude and peace and help for pain;

let us be here as on a moonlit plain; lay naked on the shingle
of the world, washing our hands of ignorant armies’ clashing.
Again the sea of faith is at her full. Look --
she flings her bright girdle, and reclines.