(Water and meditation are wedded together. —Melville)
Three-thirty and this gray day slips toward night,
The labored breathing of the tide,
The gray-blue sky, the gray-green sea,
The silver wind, the gray-white gulls,
And further out, black cormorants are diving,
Murdering their meals in swells,
The lift and fall of the gray-green sea,
Webbed claws, hooked beak,
Under the gray-blue sky.
The lift and fall, the failing light,
Sometimes you never recover.
