Daniel Tobin

SEA STAR

To hunker
down, to armor
yourself for eons,
nothing but head,
and your lips

embracing
seabed, substrate,
the predatory
years just a mild
silkening

of currents,
intertidal,
abyssal, where you
hold fast, compass-
ing the depths

from which rose
the double lives,
mirror symmetries
pursuing each
other through

the long routes
of overkill
to arrive now at
the brink of these
needful hands.

I would splay
mine, outstretched, to
your patient presence
across sediment,
your eyespots

tuned into
the dimly played
symphonies of light,
and you regen-
erating

from yourself,
from nothing, each
new aspiring arm
radiating
out of its

center, no
more the split-soul
but a new body
from Plato’s dream
given form.

This image
from above be-
low, dwelling in
kelp forests, in sea-
grass meadows.

BECKETT’S DREAM OF CARRICKMINES

Off his lucid driver the ball inscribes
a streaking arc above fairway and rough
to trace in a single stroke its shadow
on the waiting green where the hole opens
and into which both ball and shadow drop
with flag driver player course and planet….

Author: Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry), The Net, and From Nothing, as well as the critical studies Passage to the Center and Awake in America: On Irish-American Poetry.  He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play and The Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Spring 2017). His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Plume: Plume Issue #164 April 2025