Panopticon: High Tide in Spring
Panopticon: High Tide in Spring
So much world is out today.
Sea shimmer sliced by small fish who arrived
in the night. The thing about shimmer is, when disrupted,
the result is more, not less. The way our days rarely go as planned
and we’re the more alive for it. She said it was either
the Caspian
or the Arctic Tern
returning.
Footfall of runners. A girl, 9, screams
“I wanna know what love is
I want you to show me.” A friend runs circles around her in
an all-black leotard and leaps at a rhythm I can’t measure.
A ferry crosses the water
and other impossibilities.
Loon landing. Two.
Both dive in sync beneath those white peaks,
if only for a season.
This sheer amount of waterfowl, each with their own
idea of a good time, each with a squawk unique
to loving. These birds who know what pain is
by seeing the world in 360, unable to block a
moment.
Every living thing has its own way of drowning.
There are few things I love more than a warm Spring day where everyone and their mother (and sometimes their mother’s mother) find excuses to be outside and gather at Seattle’s many beautiful waterfront parks. This poem joins a lineage of other poems I’ve written about the people that emerge at the happy intersection of sun and tide, waiting for at least a +2 foot tide swell, Flotsam and Jetsam, and many more that are attuned to the waterfowl’s unpredictable dance.
There’s an abstract, drone-like image that comes to my mind: us, sitting at the park on a blanket, a respectable distance from the other pod of families and friends. We’re holding a book, as if reading, but slightly distracted by the samples of conversation and shrieks of childish delight. Suddenly, the distance is bridged by kids running in between, kicking a ball onto our blanket, asking us random questions, etc. We need these connective tissues in the world. Too much has been said of distance.
In this way, I often find myself thinking about how, for many indigenous peoples, a river is a bridge rather than a boundary, whereas, for the Western mind, a river is something to be bridged.
It’s funny how a poetic detail will stick with you and keep showing up. That’s the seeing in 360 piece for me. It first showed up in this poem two years ago.
The panopticon is a concept for a prison where all prisoners can be seen at all times, without knowing they’re being watched. I mostly just like the phonetics of it (certainly not the inhumanity)… but it fits. Due to rampant growth and reproduction, spring does have an undercurrent of witness.
Some books I read over the last two weeks (largely Ireland-inspired):
The Redress of Poetry (Oxford Lectures) by Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems of Louis Macneice
Goatfoot Milktongue Twinbird: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76 by Donald Hall
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
North Woods by Daniel Mason
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Delight and Shadows by Ted Kooser
With gratitude,
Mason