Near Murrell’s Inlet

By MORRI CREECH

The flatteries of the surf conspire to make
a stammering innuendo in the reeds.
The sun, splintered by the spume’s refractions,
sinks toward the west where it will disappear
in a violet streak above the evening dunes,
like mind considering the defeat of mind.
A cormorant in the distance breaks the surface
to wrestle a mullet from the sullen depths
farther below which no light penetrates.
As much as the theorems and hypotheses
that trouble sleep, as much as love or God
or the errant rhetoric of the passions,
as much as the tired flirtations of moon and cloud,
it is kinship to those depths one chiefly thinks of,
dark like the inward concave of the skull
and fathomless as a notion’s origin,
a place that nothing reaches, where the prinks
of sunlight shrink like a contracting pupil
into a dimming and entropic Zen
that refines every sense to senselessness,
even the one thought thinking of itself…
The mind at last, exhausted, surfaces
to what it can confirm, the blues, the bronzes,
the contours and insinuations of the real
where there is so much motion, shape, design
—the rinse and symmetry of wave on wave
unvexed by the struts and vagrancies of sandpipers,
spilling over into a still tide pool
in which a couple of bathers are parading—
that all the mind can do is add its palette
to the streaks and the extravagant daubs of color,
making a makeshift paradigm of dunes
and clouds and sea, the sun’s pernicious eye,
each green idea buoyed over the mindless deep.

Morri Creech is the author of four books of poetry, the latest of which is Blue Rooms. His fifth book, The Sentence, will be published by LSU Press this fall. He teaches at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina.

[Purchase Issue 25 here.]

Near Murrell’s Inlet

Related Posts

an image of a woman among old artifacts. the woman's back is to the photographer and she is facing the open door

Slaughterhouse-Vibe

LISA ROSENBERG
There are no streetlights between the old slaughterhouse and the edge of town. The road that links them feels longer than its few hundred barren meters, proceeding above a rocky slope that ends in channel water—the former landing place of blood and entrails, arriving by chute while dogfish gathered.

Cover of Mona Kareem's I Will Not Fold These Maps, orange cover with white writing.

Review of “I Will Not Fold These Maps”

SUMMER FARAH
My first encounter with Mona Kareem’s work was not her poetry, but her essay in Poetry Birmingham on the trend of Western poets “translating” from languages they are not literate in. Kareem brings attention to what she calls the “colonial phenomenon of rendition as translation,” in which a poet effectively workshops a rough translation done by a native speaker or someone who is otherwise literate in the original language. Often, this is the only way acclaimed writers reach Western audiences.