Vermeer

Every seaworthy vessel a woman whose mate, eloquent of how she handled under the worst of weathers, hailed his goddess of wet fire, handmaid and dockside whore. Over the courtyard’s dry dock, linens snapped. Brisk was the wind that claimed divine right to salvage whatever tore loose, brisk at the docks the trade in foreign plumage, and the milliner, arms full of wings, who tripped in a puddle that brimmed with sky. Past the known world, past the map that decorated a room with scalloped waters where ships the size of fingernail parings were never snagged by the dragon-sharp islands, a keel of leaf scraped across a pane. A branch scratched endearments on the air it then brushed clean as sand. Had the woman rereading a letter looked to the window casting her light, she could have seen almost to land’s end, the salt sea broken into semaphore flashing its glassy code for tears back to shore, seen almost to the cage on deck, the pigeons gray as the mind, some to bear messages home the first days out, the rest to fatten in the hold.