Blue Offices (Dec. 31, 2004)

For years I searched for you
in the worst of sodden ways,
embarking night by night
with hopes deep-salted
ennui and booze. Each
night I sailed through
all the bars where you
once revealed yourself
in this or that blue flame.
For a thousand
and one nights the immrama
was the same, my eyes
expectant on the crowd
dancing to heavy metal
or disco or new wave,
the shots and beers hazing
all the edges into a
hyperborean blur. My
face then was an
open book, a prow
of sorry ass lust
mortared to that craggy
wanderer’s visage,
shaped just so for
shoring needs as bad as mine.
Those beds I woke in
with those huge hangovers
-- stumps of oak poking
up from drowned suburbia,
fortune’s next nereid
snoring fast and deep,
her hair like so much
flotsom scattered mid
the wreckage -- those beds
all whispered Not Here
in your sad voice,
each one a vesper
which had crashed
again to wildly stilled
emptiness. Eventually
like a sailor harrowed by
some final isle I gave
up that futile chase —
or perhaps you gave up on
me, my gaze too finite
and my heart a halfwit
too addicted to
the brine to ever sail
into that salt wilderness
you’ve always waited
for me in. I came home
to let the horses go
and roam those fallow
seas while I got down
on aging knees to
pray and read
and dream the ribs
of what slowly
woke an abler ship.
For a thousand and
one mornings now I’ve
matinned my love
for you in these coracles
of ink and seem,
writing down every isle
you are closest to,
the ones I walk
but never wake. For
years now I’ve voyaged
thus; I can’t say that I’ve
learned much, though I
sure have seen more
wonder than I did before
when I needed so to
believe in what I saw,
when there was no
thaw for frozen,
wandering bones
than a woman’s warmer
ones. I have a wife now
and a working life,
a garden and scriptorium,
whale flukes in
plenitude on
every passing page.
The old high rage
has settled down
to till between these
faint blue lines,
distilling that old
whiskey down
until it’s Thrill of you
is now blue.
Same boat, different
hour, old vespers
poured to matins,
with you and I as
constant as the
vulgate isles of sea Latin.