There are seldom times I do not mourn the sea
And all the descending memories darkening below

The wheeling of seabirds in the wake is one.
On 32 South from Montevideo to Cape Town
As close to the sea as the deck of a ketch can get you
On the Old Girl, the A-Boat, the Atlantis One
Out of Woods Hole Oceanographic
She’s forty-seven paces from stem to stern
Along her single teak-planked deck.
She gently rides the heave of swell
that passes along and under her hull
like the hand of a lover.

Over the fading channels of the past
I recall those off-watch hours
Alone in the stern sheets
Of that friendly old double-ender
Perched on a life jacket locker,
Lost in a show played along the path of wake
A Broadway of white
Dimming toward the after horizon.
And alive, alive with the birds of the
        Southern Ocean
It is show not to be missed
And yet how missed it is.

Out in the central wastes of gray ocean
They say before a storm
amusing are the flicking black wings of
        Mother Cary
And her chicks upon the sea, the storm petrel,
Small, dark and fluttering
They look for all the world like land birds
But lubbers they are not
No tree perch respite for them
They seem to dance on water
Dropping tiny legs to dip toes
Teasing the copepods and confounding the krill
You find them working alone
in the wastes of a wide grey sea

Here in the southern ocean
Near the roaring forties

In the gray-green rich water of the
       endless westerlies
another show unfolds
the wake is alive with swirling sea and
         swirling birds
divers, gliders and water walkers
the colors of crowned heads of sea state
swooping, darting, gliding by.
Wing-tip insignias dipping to turn back to
        re-attack the roiled road
on yet another strafing run for panic stricken
        anchovies
The many outfits flying
The mariachi get-ups of the cape Pigeons
Show-offs, overdressed for this messy affair
In their gaudy patterned patches of black and white.
They are too pretty for this carnage
And there are the heavies too,
The skuas to be booed
Black-hulled awkward airship pirates
Raucous, foul-tongued sea ravens
Reeling to rob the hardworking fishers of the air
There are others aloft as well. Gannets and gulls
A page of ocean bird-book torn and thrown
        into the sky

But I have held off to tell at last of the most
         magnificent airships of the sea
That brought me to these thoughts
So far away in time and nautical miles logged . . .
The albatross, the Wandering Albatross
They alone are owner and master of these
        wide southern seas
that girdle the earth
from the Horn to the Cape of Good Hope
from Kergulen to Tasman’s Land and ‘round again.

To see them fly is to fly with them
they seem to hug the sea swell surface
as if they are part of it and born of it
Huge is this bird aloft and as full of grace as
         its sea mother
some curl of sea foam detached
and married by movement
into an wide-winged airborne thing
“bird thou never wert”
A seaman’s wonder of the world
I am sorry for those who have not flown and floated
In the zone between sea and sky
So wonderfully worked by the Wandering Albatross

There in the stern sheets
for the golden hours of wake-watching
I was in 1959 along 32 degrees south latitude
Five days or so to go for Cape Town
On cruise 258 of the research vessel, “Atlantis”
of the Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution
A memory to re-evoke 46 years hence
Staring at another wake and at the stern sheets
       of my life,
I returned to 32 degrees south latitude in 2004
As Professor of Oceanography
Aboard the 600 foot university vessel,
        “Universe Explorer”
Of the Semester at Sea Program
The students busy at the pool or at solitaire
        on their laptops
or movies in the lounge
were not with me as I leaned on the after rail of the
        old ex-liner “Queen of Bermuda.”
And searched the broad and roiling wasteland
        wake for birds
None, not one, could I find but only those alive
        in my memory
I am not the same it seems nor either is the sea
What have they done with the birds?
What have they done to the sea?
On what heading do we cruise now
As laptops yield the only colors to our eyes
And outside the wandering Albatross is gone.
What is the sea without the Albatross
What are we without the Albatross?

                               — Auden Conrad Neumann