At Days Bay
To lie on a beach after
looking at old poems: how
slow untroubled by any
grouch of mine or yours, Father
Ocean tumbles in the bay
alike with solitary
divers, cripples, yelling girls
and pipestem kids. He does what
suits us all; and somewhere — there,
out there, where the high tight sails
are going — he wears a white
death flag of foam for us, far
out, for when we want it. So
on Gea’s breast, the broad nurse
who bears with me, I think of
adolescence: that sad boy
I was, thoughts crusted with ice
on the treadmill of self-love,
Narcissus damned, who yet brought
like a coal in a hallow
stalk, the seed of fire that runs
through my veins now. I praise that
sad boy now, who having no
hope, did not blow out his brains.
Copyright Credit: James K. Baxter, "At Days Bay" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 2010 by The James K. Baxter Trust. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press, Ltd..
Source: Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, Ltd., 1979)