by Jennifer Davis Michael

Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.
–Yeats, “Byzantium”

I’m walking this Carolina beach
so different from the Gulf ones I know well

–wide, level, brown sand here,
lank-ribbed like the Ancient Mariner,
weird holes bubbling on its surface.

No trace here of the uncounted slaves
quarantined in this port, held
in the hulls of skeleton ships,
discharged into further blood and mire.

A tall young woman flows toward me
in a dress too refined for the beach,
breathless: “Did you see the dolphin?!”
I follow her pointing finger, shake my head.

Still, I squint at the dazzling water.
She turns back, points again. “There it is!
Do you see it?” I spot what might be
a flash of smooth flesh above the surface,
or maybe just sunlight on rippling waves.

But I say Yes to the exchange
of wonder. An image
only real if shared. The tearing
of my eyes from the wormholes,
the dancing floor below my feet,
and everything that lies below the sand.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a focus on British Romanticism and especially Wiliam Blake. Her poem “Forty Trochees” was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Let Me Let Go and Dubious Breath, as well as a critical monograph, Blake and the City.