The Third Existential, or, Influence

What did the original poem look like when it crawled
Out of the sea? A blooming anemone, blue as the briny darkness
From which it emerged? It was not a seagull, articulating dips and turns
Of fanciful flight, that's for sure; it was certainly not
The incarnation of the sea as a river itself, flowing upstream
Into torrid climes. What was it, then? What was the poem
Into which it came? Enough of these seascapes,

Dreamscapes into which or from which the broken mind
Escapes things. We know that the aether did not, of a sudden
Intent, coagulate into fire; we know the slopping ocean didn't
Amass itself, like so much air: nothing was born out of nothing,
But everything came from itself, out of and back into the earth which was
(And is) a mass of its own indivisible self. So stop preaching

The holy fire that could consume this incarnation of the earth,
Or the ages, a sentience wholly beyond any anxiety, but still
Generated by its death, still produced by the very act of production
That succeeds it. If poetry came out of the future,
Like a gull borne on the heavy tide of the horizon,
Then who glimpsed it, what geographer or expeditionary
Mapped out its cartography, prevalent in and of itself,
And who was he apart from it, what mark sufficient to himself?