by Alice Oswald
NOBODY
A HYMN TO THE SEA
Alice Oswald
When Agamemnon went to Troy, he paid a poet to spy on his wife, but another man rowed the poet to a stony island and seduced her. Ten years later, Agamemnon came home and was murdered.
Odysseus, setting out at the same time, was blown off course. It took him another ten years to get home, but his wife, unlike Agamemnon’s, had stayed faithful.
This poem lives in the murkiness between those stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never discovered the poem’s ending.
‘Also there was a poet there, whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy, ordered strictly to guard his wife; but once Fate had forced her to be seduced, then Aegistheus took the poet to a desert island and left him there as a lump of food for the birds, so the lover willingly took her willing to his house…’
(The Odyssey 3 267)
As the mind flutters in a man who has travelled widely
and his quick-winged eyes land everywhere
I wish I was there or there he thinks and his mind
immediately
as if passing its beam through cables
flashes through all that water and lands
less than a second later on the horizon
and someone with a telescope can see his tiny thought-form
floating on the sea-surface wondering what next
These stories flutter about
as fast as torchlight
even out here where the water is painfully clear
and to drown in it is to sense the movement of its colour
as a cold mathematical power have you not heard
even out here these stories
how in her house of silverware and deep baths
a woman began to dream she began to wake
and the heart stirring inside her clothes felt bruised
as if a hand was squeezing it
She said my friend someone is watching us you will not
win over you will not walk over me easily
as over the shallows of a river but Fate
that great failure of the will that great goddess
putting on a tremulous voice and smiling
and dressed in the white bathrobe of her lover
said dearest I have already doomed that watcher
I took him to an island the merest upthrust
of a stony shoulder sticking from the sea
and he paces there as dry as an ashtray
making up poems about us patchwork unfinished
while the sea-crows traipse to and fro regarding him sideways
what does it matter what he sings
there is all this water between us
and it is blind a kind of blind blue eye
it is alive it is dead it more or less ignores us
look at all these ripples everywhere complete with their shadows
I do not think a human for example
drowning in this measureless mosaic or floating up again
I do not think he will
hear us
These voices flit about quick-winged
with women’s faces or land on a clifftop singing
so that here and there you find fading contrails of song
and a swimmer slooshing along breathing in and out
with the purple sea circling his throat always
thinks he can hear something which nevertheless escapes him
Poor man she says poor man it’s obvious
the sea in its dark psychosis dreams of your death
but your upwardness your quick turnover like a wedge of polystyrene
always keeps you afloat this place is formless and unstable
it’s as long as winter nevertheless you must swim
wind yourself in my veil and the sea which always senses your fear
will fall as flat as a pressed flower you shouldn’t know this
it is not me but close to me a kind of cloud or smoke-ring
made of nothing and yet it will outlast everything
because it is deep it is a dead field fenceless
a thickness with many folds in it promiscuous and mingling
which in its patience always wears away the hard things
or is it only the hours on their rounds
thinking of the tides by turns
twelve white-collar workers
who manage the schedules of water
opening and shutting the mussel shells and adjusting
from black to turquoise the swinging sea-lights
so that the sun sinking through bladderwrack
into interminable aquarium
finds even far down there are white
stones
And suddenly in the violet dark
a bronze fish-hook flickers into life and out again
and when it rains and the sand has every ounce of me
marked at low tide and immediately forgotten
so that my footprints far into the future
go on sunkenly walking underneath me
when it rains it snows sometimes
as if falling asleep the body began to float
sideways
There are so many birds and most of them mean nothing
but once or twice a gannet
from a nest of slovenly seaweed
hops
as far as those stones and stops
as a woman would remembering her son
but it is done madam nothing will close that wound
unless your shaken mind moving your pointed head
can stitch the water to the wind
or is it only her ghost going round and round
with a remnant of blue
and never a clue where to place it
or is it only that poet pacing to and fro
dreaming up rumours about the first kiss
buzzing on those lovers’ flypaper lips
Small geometric figure
lost inside colour
he keeps wading out then back but it is
bottomless dusk down there pale black
nameless and numbness as when unfolding after sleeping
and your own dead foot has forgotten you
as if I waded inward
thirty yards from the surface of myself
but it’s not myself it’s just dark purple
it’s not my feet it is the hours that move
if only the birds had subtitles if only by staring
I could draw some of those directions into my mind
And sometimes over my retina
as over an angled mirror an aeroplane
sometimes between two clouds with wingtips
teetering on the very pivot of vision a passenger
throws down her shadow
in which I catch the tiny movement of her eye-blinds
lifting
and in this cloud/uncloud I who can’t settle
when I think of that crowd of colours on the sea
then my mind starts sliding towards them
borne on a wave of wind
As far as a man can shout across water
and his shout with blown-back wings
loses its bearings and is never heard of again
and another man can hear the crying waves
but his answer
dissolves in water like an oval of soap
they say this woman being twisted by sleep
began to hear things
as if the sea itself leaned over her bed
she could hear they say the exact note
in which a diver twizzles like a mobile
among triangular hanged fish
and the sea wall and the weaken
ing cliffs
as far as the hem of her clothes
being eaten away
How does it start the sea has endless beginnings
About an hour ago she surfaced and shook her arms
and peered around and dived again and surfaced
and saw someone and dived again and surfaced
and smelt all those longings of grass-flower smells
and bird-flower sounds and the vaporous poems
that hang in the chills above rivers
With crooked elbows walking and small steps
she hops to these hollow limestone caves
where the seals breathing out the sea’s bad breath
snuffle about all afternoon in sleeping bags
what kind of a rumour is beginning even now
under the waterlid she wonders there must be
hundreds of these broken and dropped-open mouths
sulking and full of silt on the seabed
I know a snorkeller found a bronze warrior once
with the oddest verdigris expression and maybe
even now a stranger is setting out
onto this disintegrating certainty this water
whatever it is whatever anything is
under these veils and veils of vision
which the light cuts but it remains
unbroken
So we floated out of sight into the unmarked air
and only our voices survived
like thistle-seed flying this way and that
a blue came over us a blue cloud
whose brown shadow goose-fleshed the sea
the ship after a little rush stopped moving
the wind with a swivelling sound began to rise
and here I am still divided in my decision
whether to heave-to or keep going under half-sail
but the water is in my thinking now
I remember the mast-pole broken by a gust
severed my two minds separate
and my body flopped like a diver over the side
then came the invisible then the visible rain
then icy and razor-sharp then green then dawn
who always wakes behind net curtains
and her watercolour character changes shade quickly like new leaves
she is excitable then shy then coppery pink
and raking her fingers around finds bits of clothing and bones
How strange she says among those better worlds underwater
where the cold of swimming is no different from the clear of looking
there are people still going about their work
unfurling sails and loosening knots
it’s as if they didn’t know they were drowned
it’s as if I blinded by my own surface
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
have to keep moving over seemingly endless yellowness
How does the dawn trawler call out to the night trawler
when they pass each other on the black and white water
There are said to be microscopic insects in the eye
who speak Greek and these invisible
ambassadors of vision never see themselves
but fly at flat surfaces and back again
with pigment caught in their shivering hair-like receptors
and this is how the weather gets taken to and fro
and the waves pass each other from one colour to the next
and sometimes mist a kind of stupefied rain
slumps over the water like a teenager
and sometimes the sun returns whose gold death mask
with its metallic stare seems to be
blinking
Two fishermen rowing across saw something jagged and disturbing
the long-drawn-out Now of a teenager
pale green and full of unripe hope
he had dressed himself in wings this is exciting
I like the angle of attack when these graded feathers
glued in their waxy grooves begin to swim the air
winding his giddiness up and up
carrying his steadfast sceptical stare
right to the summit of sight he noticed suddenly
his fate had been found out and flapping his arms
flushed
and almost glad to give up
he began to
fall
What a relief to hear his flesh
with hair and clothes flaring backwards like a last-minute flower
hit the sea and finally understand itself
his human-salt already at ease in the ocean-salt
and the white silt-like substance of exhaustion
blending with the water
if only
if only my eyes could sink under the surface
and join those mackerel shoals in their matching suits
whose shivering inner selves all inter-mirrored
all in agreement with water
wear the same
wings
But this is the sea
still with its back to me
in its flesh of a thousand faces all facing away
and who can decipher this
voice among voices
listen
This is one kind of water when it hangs over him
a man is a nobody underneath a big wave
his loneliness expands his hair floats out like seaweed
and when he surfaces his head full of green water
sitting alone on his raft in the middle of death
then it is wide it is a wide field of horrible upheavals
there are fish in it there are shearwaters searching
and sometimes in these gulfs a goddess
who used to be human now she is yellow-eyed
sometimes she shrieks heavy-winged with laughterless laughter
and lands on his raft shaking the underworld off
poor man she says poor man it’s obvious
you can sniff it everywhere the shabby weirdness
of the sea-god leaning intimately over
and turning his shadows against you
poor morsel of cork you bob about
throwaway in all this what is it grief grief grief
but this grief is so old its matter has lost its mind
blinks blinks and sees nothing
howls howls and hears nothing
And yet again water still in acute discomfort
always yearning and hallucinating and dedicated to the wind
and yet again the wind not fully awake
or was it laughter blew me along I lost track of
the underneath of things everything became my mirror
once I stood up to look over the side
I sat down again terrified it was myself I saw
thronged and pitch-green
spilling over the lip of the earth
the same soft dust-sheets over my hands as the clouds
the same thick curtain across the horizon as
sheer boredom and a deep
sea-breath
In which a spirit leaning languorously from a porthole
poured stillness over the sea like a jug of milk
and there were bones everywhere and feathered people
stood singing on the stones on rickety thin legs
with tilted chins and pressed flat wings
If you should see they said if you could spare
a moment to make out if you have any heart
to hear us mourn in short syllables
now that the stillness is pale blue
and apparitions of islands like pre-world humans
are waiting to evolve but always before they can grow detail
the air aborts them and the clouds
bafflingly quiet as if the fact of floating
had taken some weight off their minds
the clouds pause like holy men
very close and far-off in their white shr
ouds of office
If you should see a pair of blinking eyes
blue and red with weeping no sooner seen than gone
you should know they are kingfishers
man and wife in these amazing clothes
who lay their eggs on fish-bones
and for nine days when they nest the wind drops
and the hooded waves remembering their story
stammer to a hush they used to be humans
whose flesh stalks always true to the light
were on the point of flowering but the sea
which has no faith no patience
just kleptomaniac and fickle currents
drowned him
It was horrible when the rising sun
wrinkled her skin as it worked its way in
and the widow at the window saw at once
her bloated husband’s head oh pray for the crowded
ragged dead in the crypts of the sea
where the boneless octopus
only exists by endlessly altering
pray for the hollowed out souls
in the skins of the living whose lifted clothes
became
birds