Wave-Born Sanctus (2004)

Never is my mind more calmed
than when I’m rowing here,
O watering God, ferrying these
well-dippers of blue resonance
across and down the page.
Who knows if the sound
which so enchants my ear
was poured by that same loins
that filled the sea to brim.
Such facts are not required
to lift and cast my hand in
vigor of every wave-borne horse,
to gallop hoof-on-water
in words inked from abyss.
Their tones are bloom-mercurial,
belle-lettres of orange essence
both virginal and saucy in
the breeze, a mint of two-faced
doubloons spilled from vaults
below or within or on some
hidden shore between this day’s
poem and the poem not here yet.
Sulis, Rhiannon, mare Uffington
and Brigit all bed these lines
in the devout two inches
which margin both sides of flow,
across the fold which separates
the pages by a bind, and beyond
the turn of one page to the next.
Of their actual pubes and nips
and bites and moanings I’ll
not defile this pregnant surf:
Suffice to say such lucencies
coil in the wooings here
which only seem like waves
of words against an always empty
shore. Manannan smiles in Oran’s
gape, his tongue undead and
buoyed above all flood. His
missal slowly fills up here,
inked in his blood and the
spool of some whalish organum
I’ll never understand, much
lest name. My job’s to ferry
in my hands blue jots of
merry scrip and scree, the
jowled juju of Your frothernity,
and leave ‘em on this shore
that ends my every poem,
conch and spilt coin and
wilder wave-wrack than any
one has seen or sung
for you to carry home or on
to shores your gods will bid
you ferry, fold and crash.