New Haven
A poem by Michael Fox, a painting by Anne Lever
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New Haven
What you keep me safe from is the sea’s madness,
as if it were my own, and you a night attendant,
settling me down with quilts, and cards, and hot sweet cocoa
to ride out the swell of dreams. Look - on the rail
four nightmares quartering the view like squalls
while the dirty stucco of the town cracks with embarrassment.
No wonder the sea rages. It is the leftover slop
of some other narrative, displaced, lacking coherence,
forever dissolving. Whatever flow it had betrayed
by the weight of calendar, the whim of wind.
© Michael Fox 2025I turn this week to another poem about a place where land and sea meet. The poet Rilke wrote: When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” My poem draws rather less comfort from the constant roil and raging of the ocean, and finds solace instead in another presence which helps in the end to provide distance and perspective.
Alain de Botton’s and John Armstrong’s book ‘Art as Therapy’ provides a clue to the identity of this presence, this ‘you’ in the poem. Deep attention to art, to the free play of colour and form, to detail and overview, can help to untangle our own personal bewilderments and soothe the pain of inner turmoil.
My hope is that poetry, in its clarifying distillations, its rhythms and music, its playfulness allied with deep seriousness, can do the same.
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