Ferryboats
The cool sea cups its hands
around the Blue Star Ithaki Line to lift us up like this,
a thick cloud of gas swelling after us, and the motor
plugs along through this dark and petrol-smelling Aegean
whose cold conceals the boiling
stories that have dipped their feet into it,
the epics about people who were sailors
above almost, but finally not really, everything else.
If you don’t like your story, drop it in,
and if the waves don’t smooth it clean, then nothing will:
sweeping off each broken word in salty swells,
drowning them in other stories, other names,
until you’re just another ripple to support the ferryboats,
which are so large, and so heavy, and run so well,
all the way to here or nowhere,
plugging on and on.
Keep your eye on the boat,
its long hard floorboards
gleaming blankly beneath the ceiling lights.
You never know
what boat you’re on;
if you don’t watch out
you’ll start imagining all kinds of boats.
And while the sun declines to night
and its bright reflection glides below,
till light and mirror image merge
at last in the horizon’s sudden blaze,
I can’t tell which sky this ship is floating on,
the real or the reflected one –
at their juncture the sun
flashes out like something metal,
a hinge that joins the sky and sea
as a lid joins to an open box –
then the bolt fails,
darkness thumps down over us,
the lid swings closed.