Men of Aran: A Sentence

BY James Harms

Dressed in seaweed
and mist, cankers
of barnacles and
broken buoy bells,
the shades of fishermen
arrive to watch
their sons and grandsons,
nephews and old friends,
the still-living in their bobbled
bonnets and rolled
trousers — to watch them
launch their currachs
while basking sharks
drift close on shifting
currents, enough oil
in their lazy livers
for months of light
beside the shifting North
Atlantic, postal code
of fishermen and riggers
and bones — as Hart Crane
wrote — tumbling like dice
in the dark at the bottom
of the world, a darkness
that lightens as
the atmospheres lessen
and finally shifts to gray
at the edge of a breaking
wave, then briefly to
white as the wave covers
rock so black it seems
more of the same,
more sea.

 

Biography

JAMES HARMS is the author of eight books of poetry, including two forthcoming volumes, What to Borrow, What to Steal (Marick Press, 2011) and Comet Scar (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012). His work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Verse, The North American Review, Oxford American and many other literary journals. A contributing editor of West Branch, he has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, fellowships from the West Virginia and Pennsylvania Arts Commissions and three Pushcart Prizes. A Professor of English at West Virginia University, he also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College.

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