In memoriam Richard Hugo

Six or seven rows of waves struggle landward.

The wind batters a pewtery sheen on the water between them.

As each wave makes its way in, most of it gets blown back out to

sea, subverting even necessity.

The bass rumble of sea stones, audible when the waves flee all

broken back out to sea, itself blows out to sea.

Now a log maybe thirty feet long and six across gets up and

trundles down the beach.

Like a dog fetching a stick it flops unhesitatingly into the water.

An enormous wave at once sends it wallowing back up the beach

again.

It lies among other driftwood, almost panting. Sure enough, after

a few minutes it gets up, trundles down the beach, throws itself

into the water again.

The last time I was on this coast Richard Hugo and I had dinner

together just north of here, in a restaurant overlooking the sea.

The conversation came around to personification.

We agreed that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets almost

had to personify, it was like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the

only way they could imagine to keep the world from turning

into dead matter.

And that as post-Darwinians it was up to use to anthropomorphize

the world less and animalize, vegetablize, and mineralize

ourselves more.

We doubted that pre-Darwinian language would let us.

Our talk turned to James Wright, how his kinship with salamanders,

spiders and mosquitoes allowed him to drift back down

through the evolutionary stages.

When a group of people gets up from a table, the table doesn’t

know which way any of them will go.

James Wright went back to the end. So did Richard Hugo.

The waves coming in burst up through their crests and fly very

brilliant back out to sea.

The log gets up yet again, goes rolling and bouncing down the

beach, plunges as though for good into the water.