Sea Copyist

Many human occupations were imitated by the fairies. There was a small boat-building yard at Lerwick, and often at dusk the boss would say, “Now boys, it’s time to be putting about your tools. They’ll be wanting to get to work!”

-- Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Traditions and Literature

***

Voyage episode 29 has the story of a little man whom Brendan sees bobbing about on the waves on top of a leaf. According to (the) M (version) the leaf is the size of a hand, according to C and H the little chap is hardly an inch tall.

He dips the stylus (the bowl M) into the sea, after which he holds it over the bowl to catch the water dripping off the stylus. When the bowl is full, he at once empties it into the sea, an action which amazes Brendan and his companions.

Brendan asks him why he is doing this and the little man replies that he is measuring the volume of the sea, and will continue to do so until Doomsday. He hopes God will be merciful once he has finished measuring. Brendan says, “You will never succeed in measuring the sea completely. The whole world would not be able to measure the sea before Doomsday.” The little man on the leaf answers: “No more can I measure the sea before Doomsday, is it possible for you to see (with your eyes M) all God’s wonders on this earth. Your spiritual children need your support. Pray God to keep you safe; we must part.”

-- Clara Strijbosch, The Seafaring Saint: Sources and Analogues of the Twelfth Century Voyage of St. Brendan

***

According to an exemplum in the Bienboec, St. Augustine, when out walking, saw an exceptionally beautiful child ladling water with a silver spoon from the sea into a hole in the sand. This was at the time that St. Augustine was writing his book on the Holy Trinity.

When he asked what the child was doing, it answered: “What I am trying to do, is less impossible than what you are intending. You intend to explain in a booklet the secret of the sacrament of the Trinity. I will have spooned all the water from the sea into this hole in the sand before you will have explained the mystery in a treatise.”

Having said this, the child disappeared at once. St. Augustine praised the Lord and realized the truth of the child’s words.

-- in Strijbosch, ibid



SEA-COPYIST

Quite the fool’s errand, eh Lord,
measuring the breadth and depth
of wildest seas with just these
thimbles of frail white paper,
a copyist in the sea’s scriptorium
writing down its book wave
by gale by gloom. Might as well
try to dowse and dive the
harrows of the heart
with only this prick of a pen
to guide me and slake Thee,
with only words to eye the
winging mantas down there
& track the shadows which
they gyre. Yet measure both
is my daily task, with tools
not meant for either, dry paper
leeched down by water
as soon as it’s afloat,
ink so awkward a gloss
for blood, more apt for spooring
down the keels of sinking boats.
I sit here on this dank shore
beneath a summer night’s sky
heavy as the sea itself,
humid and thick as what
I recall once wafted on my
face as I knelt to pray between
a woman’s crooning thighs,
the mysterium her incense
redolent of fish and seaweed
and my own birth’s mewling sighs.
All that’s inside and down
the scent of early morning
I copy here, sated after
storms doused the garden
yesterday and good,
the way new lovers
drench each other in
their first surrenders
to the sea’s final desire.
That air moats my head
as I mouth another draught
of salted blue and begin to sing
what the sea-god dreams
from his lost court far beneath
the mortal marge I seam.
How much of this is his?
What is the wet part of the sea?
That’s the task I enterprise
in writing all this down,
siloing drop by drop a
paper heart of wet dreams
and bluer porpoisings
astride the world’s first waves,
naked and ejaculate
and forever lost at toil
which I’ll never pour down
to the lees. So many secret
gospels rounded in each drop,
so little time to name them!
And every day I find another
conch demanding that I
listen deep and sing back
what I hear, as copyists
once copyists once scanned
seas of ink and ferried
it word by word across
a distance to another text,
line by line, year after year.
Am I less for having started
what only whales and Gabriels
can name with their deep
tubas and day-rousing horns?
Certainly. But a faith
whispers in my ear like the
sea inside a shell that
this work is Yours, over
and under all I thought
to say: An exercise in
futile shouts as synecdoche
of crashing waves.
I’m just the larynx of the
Sphinx curled just offshore
whose eyes blue up the marge.
Can you feel those eyes
boring into you beyond
the ends of these lines?
I bucket out the sea
with the pages of a
filling book: Perhaps
I fill a saint’s lost well,
perhaps I’m bailing
the heart it hails.