Sea Shanty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sea Shanty

 

 

Once I thought I had pain for my oceanliner, but

it was a clipper ship, a visitor skimming

the shallows of easy tears, creaking

in every board its promise of moonlight drowning

the dark-kissing sea in silver flakes,

of fools' journey's-end a Crusoe'd sort of shipwreck

where everything needed is salvageable,

of undiscovered places to find but never know.

But that of course was not pain.

Pain is an ocean

without any ship, flowerless and vast,

no islands of palms and coconuts

no brown eyes dancing

from the landward side of the reef

to blunt

the sharp-split wreckage of spars and bones,

no Man Friday

to carry my white man's burden for me,

to feed me 

on conch meat and keep me alive

with all the driftwood exotica of empire.

 

There is only

the cold that pierces too deep

before it numbs, the struggling silence

 

that floats the water

that slides through my hands

and the

 

constant 

unbearable fear

of breathing it in.

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Sea Spray, 1908, pen & ink watercolor, ©Harold Sohlberg   Fair Use

Untitled, ©Zdzislaw Beksinki      Fair Use

 

Left

"Don't you leave me here

don't you leave me here

but if you  must go sweet baby,

leave a dime for beer."

Left

The first time I was left

I was unborn

before I knew to flip myself

and swim upstream

to shadow's
shifting shelter in the reeds.

Leaving after leaving

set the hook,
so many hands to pull

 the finished fish out of the drink.

All that's left:
a  silver glimmer and a stink

among the weeds.

~September 2016

posted for   real toads


Flash 55 Plus 

 Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: Golden Fishes in a Dark Sea, 2006, © Twins Seven Seven

Fair use.

The One-Legged Pilot

The One-Legged Pilot

When the trip begins the shore

is decorated with shipwrecked sunspots,

round mirrors of messaged bottles

I save from their cold blue exile,

and littered with rags of the rescued

I've replaced with nothing 

but the silken silver whisper

of my hair on salt-splotched skin.

The sirens call us, shrieking,

arabesque on their wayward rocks,

to sing us the torment of flesh,

of which there was never enough;
They curse

each plank we walk, and

even the death below

so nothing can really save us,

yet the peg-leg pilot 

steers us onward. The beach rears up at last; 

dry sand drinks our tears

while the sweet hormonal sea,
its tidal pulsing

the sirens' operatic hypnotic, even the grace

of salvage itself
abandons ships and sailors and

I am what washes up

alone on an arctic rim, hollow 

as a rind of frozen shell.

But the demon in the song is always full

and he is true still.

He's watched at the drydock of my bed

as decades rolled themselves up

like razor wire, tangled and untouchable

drawing blood at the slightest move.

He's seen the candle lit

and blown out
lit
and blown out
til the stump is smaller

and flatter

than even the look in your eyes.

A faithful sea-dog, my demon pilot

strong on a single leg, old but hot as pitch

his ivory teeth bigger, brighter--

a white flash in the liquid night

that only shows when he smiles.

~March 2016

 posted for        real toads

Weekend Challenge


Note: This poem has been edited since the reading



If you'd like to hear the poem clumsily read by the author, click below:

The Siren, and
Ulysses and the Sirens(Detail), by John William Waterhouse.

Public domain

Down On The Coast

Down on the Coast

Three ragged rocks in the bay of the heart

smoothed and seamed by the tailoring spray

now pressed flat as the long wave fades

the water stills, the tide splays

with all its fleery flotsam,

ambergris and driftwood caveats
pulled to deeper decay.

Eleven pouting lemons in a cobalt blue bowl,
secret and sullen as xanthic mollusks,

bitter suns curdling morning to fractions

piercing the tongue with soured satisfactions,

as if to say I told you so

but you just had to 

keep adding sugar.

In the dim gaslight of a half-sincere dream

the medium saw the house burn down, beam

by beam, red walls glow to nothing, saw drawn

in charcoal ectoplasm all the burnt debris--
daguerreotypes of she, of thee

wet framed in blackened ash, 

ruined before time for tea.

Tonight I dream your absinthe aftertaste

gulping loss, coughing up your waste
choking on the acrid gnosis
of each indifferent clumsy phasing

in and out, fractured in either placing,

making and unmaking 

the mask of a sailor's face.

Three rocks in the bay of the heart;

name them as you please or will, so

smoothed and seamed in glinting calm,

blue-ruffled in a bay without a mark;
still mirrors lit by day that in the dark

will founder any cockswain lost at sea

who seeks to come to anchor in that lee.

~May 2012

revised December 2015

Reposted for  real toads

 

Tuesday Platform

Nothing to do with the holidays, just an old wash of words as the pale winter sun enters Capricorn.

Image: I've once again borrowed the work of my friend Petteri Sulonen. Thanks, Petteri, as always for the use of this shot:

Calm Day, by Petteri Sulonen on flick'r

Petteri's photostream

The Fickle Selkie

 

The Fickle Selkie

You came in on the wave

you left on,

dripping sleek and strong 

your secrets wearied in the foam.

You opened wide

your kelp drift eyes 

so I could see 

timelessly

the sea you plowed so long

 without a harvest

richer than sing-song.

We waltzed the wrecks

on dead men's bones,

and of 

the everything we found
we carried
nothing home.

I should have known

you'd leave as quick

as sea fret wrack

without a sound.

You are

nothing to me now---

your joys or griefs,

your warmth that fades

in the windy days

of a landsman's chill,

nothing at all of sea or land

less than the

 fine dust that seeps a sand

between lid and eye

to stab each blink,

an almost-nothing soon gone
in the rub of tears.

You are

nothing to me now

nothing, 

nothing at all--

no scrimshaw kiss

no oceanic salt-lick--

only a bit of bric-

a-brac decor,

the mounted skull

beside the door

of some strayed herbivore

who met its end in heat and thirst,

bleached and white and empty-eyed,

ant-cleaned of all the tasty worst.

Outside the walls

I cannot hear

the wave that crashes on

 your name
circling spray 

in wraithlike wreaths

around my lambent chimney tor, 

the smoke of cedars
 upward taking blind

into nothing

the burn of the soft wet skin
you left behind.

~September, 2015 

"Selkies ...are mythological creatures found in Scottish, Irish, [Icelandic] and Faroese folklore... Selkies are said to live as seals in the sea but shed their skin to become human on land."

~wikipedia

Image: Näcken (The Water Sprite), 1882 by Ernst Josephson, public domain via wikimedia commons