I. A Long Voyage, 1621

I left you where you are:
A humming late summer afternoon
& mottled by shade a man reading a letter
Becomes the image of a man reading
That I am forgetting.
This page is small yet stout enough
To bear me whole upon it to you
All the way in London. I may expand
Myself at leisure then fold it tight,
A sanctuary;
Like our vessel christened The George,
My letter is another ark to preserve me: George.
No midnight is so private as the sea’s:
Timbers breathe, a loose rope snaps, & as the wind
Shoves you behind then slaps your face,
Seeing nothing, nothing to be seen, you feel
Unhoused, evicted from time.
But tonight, my love, my lamp is feathered, shy,
Herald of the next ransack & assail.
Behold the storm petrel! gray wick-threaded throat
Burning the oil secreted, an amber musk
Of uncompassed seas & the solitary hunt,
Of error & sign, &
That delirium—which turned
Our ship’s boy to mowing fields of Atlantic salt.
Like windrows he dropped the waves.
Until gaffed, pulled like a sleeve
Through himself,
He will live, tongue-bit, torn.
To return likely to a stool set on the shale
Where he can mend nets skirted by braggarts
Who have never traveled farther
Than the smoke dribbling from their chimneys.
I try never to imagine drowning.
Noisy urgent inefficiencies above, waves
Pummeling, sky shredding, & the body
Anchored only in its just longing for air.
The tighter death’s embrace, the more languorous
The moment. So this boy suffered
Some vast charity of sight.
He was what he saw, an adam.
Now he may be adamant & stain & distance;
& also that small satin interruption
Of terror—the instant breath’s
Orphaned by self’s perishing through poetry.
Like Daphne his voice is forfeit for the song,
But we do not grieve for Daphne.
My bird-light gutters.
Its call had sounded
Like dry wood giving up a nail.
What is this your wound that you must follow it?
For you I had no answer; consider only the reveries
Of the carpet navigator in his room. Listening
To collisions of wave & star outside his tower,
Rock-rapt, icebound, with a mind by dread
& ceremony & the dozen arts of courtesy
Girded, he invented those ideal earths in latitudes
Unstrung that I now trespass—
After I had translated two books
To the pouring of seas & clamor of sailors
I began to brood long on landlessness,
Coming to believe it my sovereign, my home,
When on the flat horizon of weeks at noon the flaw:
A color merely, private, ethereal, collecting
Heft in the warp of time. Days
Before we quailed at the barbed illegible pelt
Of forest, I wrecked, forlorn upon its savor,
Sweet damage of apples
Fermenting in rain-soaked hay,
Giving way to something ranker—
I tasted it at dinner lying on my tongue.
I am His Majesty’s servant as my god made me;
I am also my damps & exaltations; I am afraid.
Heaven & hell enlisted their geographers,
A map has opened the soul’s five hinges, & Persian
With expectance how often have I feasted
On departure. London, Naples,
Marriage, Damascus, now your dear person.
So much flowing through me
My sight has silted dark my mouth. I beg
All the many tongues your wonder cabinet holds
—Dolphin, mockingbird, Muscovy bear—to tell
This arrival, so unforeseen, disorderly
As my hope you will not forget who I was, & am,
Unwildered, unwestered, constant, returning.
Bless you where you are, & where you would be
When you are there, & bring you thither.
My love,
What may never not be strange? What,
This morning, will wake & make me new.
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