A+Seashell+for+Vernon+Watkins

The poem
A stage moon and you, too, unreal, unearthed. T hen two shadows athletic down the cliffs of Pennard near the nightshift of the sea. You spoke of Yeats and Dylan, your sonorous pin-ups. I thought //relentless romantic!// Darkness stayed in a cave and I lifted a sea shell from you shadow when you big-talked how the dead resume the silence of God.

The banks calls in its debts and all are earthed. Only one shadow at Pennard today and listening to another sea-shell I found, startled, its phantom sea utterly silent - the shell's cochlea scooped out. Yet appropriate that small void, that interruption of sound, for what should be heard in a shell at Pennard but the stopped breath of a poet who once sang loud?

Others gone also, like you dispensable famed names once writ in gold on spines of books now rarely opened, the young asking, 'Who?' The beaches of the world should be strewn with such dumb shells while the immortal sea syllables in self-love its own name,'Sea, Sea, Sea, Sea.' I turn to leave Pennard. This shell is useless. If I could cry I would but not for you.