The Mariner’s Progress

“With never a whisper on the main,” so the snow falls,

glaring through the festschrift of acacia leaves

at sunrise and seeping a dye of immortelle

on mild fleece, shrinking back eternity

to flurries stalking summer cairns.

Somewhere, harpies in cruisers blare

beneath prairie clouds. An iceberg flashes, turns

a smoke of ice on the air.

The cold repels, draws out redoubling whites;

in the green heat you hallucinate where the sea runs,

light on light, creeping the heights

your new turret on the house in clouds scorns

nothing: poetry’s sub rosa, ever uncompromised,

as now, infrared crows eclipse the lawns.

2

And I once brute and stammering to

you toppled in a blue beach chair,

pushed to the meridian-hush island coup

talk, but your eyes search out where

children leap hotels’ sand dams and worry

the guard and his dog. The triumph of

surrender, of love flamed from history,

like that pyro-tailor’s scissors bright roar,

reducing the “treasury of the poor.”

You sputter into a blinding cough

and recover with, “Emerson?” Yes, that culprit

all along, new to me, so was Boston

Common when we waited in the trash fire of autumn

and could feel salt driving off the Atlantic.

3

Where the mezcal ferns begin and after them

dross wet soil rises from bank to ridge,

sunset’s slow inflation; you point; they change

in one stroke to mountain-blue foliage!

On utility poles hang night’s recessive fable.

Again, you stab the windscreen    ...    out there,

abundant still lifes, the stark inflammable

river you will cross over, recoil at the pier.

What value is the ride? In digression,

art. A mare froths in the sea the following day.

It seems, gathered up by spokes of clouds,

caught in an agonizing conversion.

You jolt towards it, but out laughed a schoolboy, way

too happy — “O Apilo!” — sun-blasted, all colors.

4

Clinking cavalcade inching up the Sunday

road lined with crowds: none anonymous,

moving as lines do, growing in depth of play,

unstable and absolute where they must.

Each thing has a crack, indeed. Adjust the mirror

beyond the surf’s exhortation and see

arched dolphins at equinox blur

with drizzle Port Antonio into Vigie.

Half mile of bamboo cathedral

tunnels an airy pass there once; its shadows hacked away

and in that vacancy light depreciates now.

Geography is not fate but fatal.

Gone is the corridor to hold your glory.

The sun and sea in your eyes still bow.

5

Pilgrim of occasional fireflies,

brooding inside the Alliance Française Pyramid,

where the wild honey expires

and the doggerel air embalms all you’ve lived,

relived with lament and praise. Pain’s license.

Silence, then the reciprocity of silence, its

immense language sends an ibis

to absolve and to mark your sins.

Late-in-life astonishment, like bitcoins

on the tongue. What you say is hidden

in noon gossip. Yes, having a gift is to be called.

Since it is given, let it go. The mind irons

bronze in water, a voice radiating:

“We please our elders when we sit enthralled.”

6

Ascend and bless the devil’s altitude.

Shale drifting from the sky’s blue furnace.

Slant sparks of green off the vale Santa Cruz

below, being so blessed, this is penance,

of a kind, my own road to Emmaus,

wafers upon wafers of oleanders suture

those eyes scattered and staring through dust.

Around each bend arrives the future,

which departs exactly close to Lalibela

one fleeting night the rock churches wept

by my ears, refracted Stoney Hill’s stars,

their ragged music pitching diaspora

against despair. Such music you’ve left

withstands permanently the striation of scars.

7

To evening air I add, “blown cane blown cane

blown cane,” and step into the Quattrocento

outside the library by the pier. All’s changed.

Blown I am a broad Antillean echo

lost in the marrow wings of a pelican,

or an albatross, cloud remnant, tasseled

low flyer below the radar of the wind.

Trade Winds. Travailed not traveled. Shit-bloodied.

A million blades choir and collapse

on repeat their absolute, surging pledge,

picked up by potholes which I jump to reach

home. Blown canes, singed from the African holocaust.

Dark breaks in me carrying your line, lucid

sandglass, seething uphill. Mine to keep and give.

8

The kite season is early. Little insurgence

everywhere of souls lifting, subsiding

half transparent in night’s green silence.

By morning they are fallen over the cement fence,

your childhood allamandas annunciate your last withdrawal

into heat so fierce it breaks its own laws

and the man into tears along Lapeyrouse seawall,

his umbrella kite shielding the sun from the murals.

Meantime, I hesitate on a maroon canal in Delft,

crossing water’s filial piety, erring rings whisper

“small honors in the storm” and watch moss lilies

drift into untouchable maze, fastened to each other.

Your ancestors’ spires are of ambergris,

they magnify in the water my spectral self.