The Mouth of the Bay

In poems written on the rocky coast of Frenchman Bay in Maine, Michael Ruby begins with wisdom and ends with delight, reversing Frost’s famous dictum about poetry. The Mouth of the Bay begins with the wisdom of the Eleatic philosophers in southern Italy and Sicily—“There is no beginning and there is no end”—and their calls for purification. Ruby writes the words that appear in his mind when he repeats sayings of Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and others. In “Elements,” he breaks the coastal landscape into six elements—rocks, water, islands, mountain, sky, sun—and writes a stanza for each, creating a series of 23 poems akin to abstract expressionist landscapes. In the long poem, “Wave Talk,” he listens to small waves lapping against the rocks and writes the conversational phrases that appear in his mind. In the last section, “Foghorns,” he responds to the blue sky and water of Frenchman Bay on clear days and the two-note foghorn at Egg Rock Light on foggy days. The poems end with delight in the sights and sounds around us, the words that appear within us.