Short Voyage, Long Shores

... And a short voyage we shall share
and all my hopes at last fulfill,
advancing onwards slowly where
her grace and beauty lead me still.

-- Arnaut de Mareuil (13th cent.)
transl. Jack Lindsay

What a short voyage indeed,
those days and nights
which shored our first and
farewell kiss; and yet
that once we travelled
so far out to sea
that I’ve yet to fully
return. Amid years
of grief and waste
and eventual remarriage
to the life, its wife
and margeless
meanderings,
a ghostlike reverence
has remained, the flickering
tallow of that sea-wave
in your smile which tides
so dark and richly
far below or beyond
or inside aging days.
Somewhere I’m still
aboard that bed we
floated on between an
infinite crash and fall.
Inside silvery blue-glass
walls that curved
and held us in thrall
we exchanged again
the tokens which
first broke in us
when stars were fresh
as cream -- halves of
a fin-bone we
once saddled to
every sea-depths
upon dragonish shapes,
our wings the span of
every voyage we later
dreamed when sails
were hurled by sighs.
Oh, that voyage led
to nothing for those
two random twenty-
somethings who
were about nothing
but sex and a fool’s
notion of love in
1982: Another bad
seed fallen from
that that bad pop
song “Believin’”
by Journey, where the
voyage never stops
long after kisses and
high hopes have all
turned and walked away.
And look what there
has grown: a green tower
of arching ache
with which roots as
deep as boughs
as flung wide. Here
is the esplumoir which
feeds from what we
found inside that wave
for oh so short a
season -- a few weeks
of days and nights,
that’s all -- a half
dozen rapturous
tsunamis one love’s
thousand lifetimes tall.
God and Devil were
raptured back that
season from the
chill of their abyss,
to rim and ring and
riddle forth the
memory of that
shared so shoreless kiss