CANTO 31 Dolphins rise

 

Dolphins rise shedding spray,

then dive to what they must.

There’s mist on the wind,

sea-salt fever, work undone.

Cross-wind sweeps the raft

against the rock

or down the white noise

of mist that swirls, lifting

 

the eye out of the wreck,

wreathing into a cloud that tightens

pulls the swarming self dissolved

in tricks of definitions,

coils into a vortex

that might coalesce, compress

to whitest heat—

the joke’s already played

so we number the eye as third,

expelled by the force it would use to seize,

thrust backward into the dark

vision that rushes away

the self empty, gray.