At Sea in Snow

            

                         For the infinite air is unkind,

            And the sea flint-flakes, black-backed in the regular

                        blow,

            Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

                        Wiry and white-firey and whirlwind-

                                    swiveled snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

                                                            (13)The Wreck of the Deuchland

                                                            Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s different, it must be, to see at sea the soft

(yet mosttimes not) long drift (or sometimes not)

of flake on flake on flake, and the way

it accumulates on the deck, the way it’s absolutely

swallowed by the salt-rimmed lips of each low

or high slope wave meeting the dip of the ship: utterly There.  
And then.  Not.

How, now, seeing the pocked sky and the inch high

white on the coats of the crew, they in black boiled wool

coats, pounding the bow to crack the weight of the ice, 
how they disappear in the wind and snow

in their slow clearing of the deck so that they’re in

and out, like the ship in the wind, of the frame: visible                                        absent

visible              absent                          visible

Or they’re a lighthouse beam, whose straight out from shore eye

creates the perfect aperture  -  hole: closure : hole : closure - a code

of what cliff you’re about to break apart run aground on…

but oh if my brother could be here he loved snow he just dug

and tunneled and flung into it when he…

and the pitch shifts and the snow, what drifts past him, his

turn whacking at the deck, what falls into the dark drink, is gone

all gone, as gone as all the boys that day all eight boys

when the eye when the sky when it all everything (after

they died) was snow-falling quiet.