Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

Til My Ship Comes In

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becalmed on a sea of smoke

a nowhere that could be anywhere

I made an indigo wind

to fill my sails.

 

"It's just enchantment, " you said,

"It's not personal." as

the voyage began

to tick down

 

kiss by kiss, bookmarks

in the wildness

floating your stopwatch eyes.

"Time's up!" you said,

and changed the rules.

I thought everything not experimental

was forbidden, but it seems heartbreak

will ruin a boat.

The shipwreck was easy,

but the distance to shore

was a bitch. Still

but still,

 

better to drown

than to straddle a broken bench

and bleed, bailing a sinking boat

with no bottom. 

April 2024

posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Boat of the Mermaid, ©Sabin Balasa via internet Fair Use

A Rocky Shore, Iona  ©Samuel Peploe, via internet    Fair Use

Blown Away

 

 

 

 

Blown Away

 

 

Come look

at what I salvaged

from the breakdown:

 

in this jar is Chicago

with its concrete throat

that tried so hard to swallow me

 

and here is Montana

mountain wild, spruce bending

to save me, painted

 

in five colors on my spurious tongue

that cracked ripe hearts

like nutshells in

the vise of logic. The rest

of what I had sailed in my witchboat,

to a quiet Viking funeral with

 

 no one watching--riddled

seeds, costumes and seven secrets

wrapped in your trinket kisses--

but I kept the beach

at Point Reyes, where the wind

clean off the ocean

is strong enough

to blow away

your life.

October 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Untitled (marina) © Zdzislaw Beksinksi   Fair Use

Point Reyes, California, Tomales Point Trail with Wild Radish, NPS/A. Kopshever   Fair Use

Floaters

 

 

 

 

 

 

Floaters

 

 

 

My eyes have

made small islands in their sea

that float between me

and what I want to be there,

all desired clear

but now obscured,

invisible for what they are,

and never heard.

Palm trees instead of paragraphs,

not faces, forms, but homemade rafts

drifting across a wavy film, not words,

but blind reality.

 

 November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Meeting the Bar

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Clouds In Finland, 1908 © Konrad Kryzanowski,  Public Domain

Boat, c.1918 © Salvador Dali   Public Domain