The Mariner’s Progress

1 “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.