I
Sinew seeping, midnight weeping, dream secreting
Ocean under me. Carry me
To Innisfree, a time-smoothed sanity.
Alone with disenchanted algae, I sit
As the sands of mind settle into a stillness
That always felt like a clarity to me.
I can’t recall the happy permanence I wrote of
On anxious scraps with self-conscious dexterity.
Curling relics of my exultant prose flutter in my lap as I hold the stern West.
The wide and waking sky compresses my solitary
Self, enforcing the stillness that started as a choice
brittle with expanse.

II
To Atlantis!
Whisper the pirate’s oath and
Sail on until your fingers web and your hair grows long;
Until you can sing the songs of the deep,
Your own solaced requiem.
Until a seamless tear in the fabric leads
To a longer voyage where the ache of loneliness heals,
Soothed by the cold touch of kindred spirits.

Slicing too easily through a sea aching with a silence, spilling
Out the blunt notes of the whale’s lament with every moan
Of the wind, an echo catches
On the adolescent stern of my ship -

 - the animal soup hits me with a symphony
As a dry-ice afterlife softens the rusted edge of my helm.
Somehow the soft edges pierce the black glass in the night:
Behold the whale’s crisp soliloquy and the sounds of the shadows -

Chitter and chatter and chitter-
-Chatter and chitter and chatter!
Oh, revelation, oh, destination;
Curling scraps of paper fly about; the sky,

A convex breathy blow, licks them up with exaggerated movement.
Holy apocalypse! Sweet destination!
The ship slips under and I step across
The wide tidal wedge.