background image
125
Dog-days II
Incidentally Recalling a Dying Seal
-- Not that its old kind give a damn for it.
For us who live here, the impersonal
Bright quiet gaze of that dying animal
Put rightly the relation of the fi t
And unfi t both, to that of which we're knit.
And once the indiff erence is mutual
Shall consciousness here in the individual
Turn with the whole? the light of light be lit?
I know I saw that seal dying his death
Half sunk into the sand, on the sunny shore
In the tide-wash: with each wave coming in,
The sand sucking him deeper than before,
The water swirling over his head again,
Subsiding, he catching another breath.