Where Do The Crabs Go? Poem by Robert P Arthur

Where Do the Crabs Go?


Where do the crabs go
leaving their shadows behind them
What presses their return from
the autumnal reef

In the winter I shall row with a
stranger beside me
Call him an old hand, ready with the sail
Let the stranger spend his knowledge
of all things passing
The fiery sun that blushes to be born
The stirrings in the cottages
and demarcations of the gull
I shall row from the darkness of my
brain to where charts have no meaning
And my friends of the air cannot see one another

And should you move with me
sidereally
beyond the shallows
Your petticoats behind you
And the tide at an oar

We may hope to discover no eddying
of days, or hands, or shoals
Only ourselves—ghosts of light
and tireless travelers
Some fisherman on the bay will look
up from his catch and say
with a blue sook listening
I am a living thing

I breathe and I am dying

But that is not what we'll whisper
with our voices of shelled things
In our skins of water