Encounter
At two thousand feet the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand.
Closer, in a monotone of peristalsis,
Its fugue-like swells create and recreate
One image in an idiot concentration.
From horizon to horizon, this desert
With the eye athirst for something stable
When off to southeast-ward—
It was a plane all right, or had been,
A shipside fighter, her pontoons floated her.
Smashed like a match-case, no one could be sure
If it were ours or had been one of theirs.
That’s all there was. A thousand miles anywhere
There was only the north ocean, the poleward pallor,
Like a desolation of spirit, lonelier than god.
What did it mean? They thought of night fleets
In the ghostly boreal dark or maybe
Toy cardboard silhouettes in the bleak limbo of noon:
The salvos wink in bloom at twenty miles,
The pause, the roar like a night freight
And the near misses building their faery forests.
Where were these giants? The sea offered
A single clue, a symbol; no explanation.
Northward the fog banks thickened and on all horizons
As if jealous of giving up secured positions
The night stirred angrily like an old suspicion.
Copyright Credit: Thomas McGrath, “Encounter” from Movie At The End of the World. Copyright � 1972 by Thomas McGrath. Used by permission of Swallow Press/Ohio University Press.
Source: Poetry (April 1946)