Name the islands as they pass. Nosing them aside with the prow of a small boat, low in the water, skimming toward a sunrise no poet would dare describe as the color of tripe. Surf surrounds each island with the same white-tipped ring. Wind wintles the crease of the sail, perfect paunch above the smooth wave-cutting ride.
A pirate’s pick-up calls the occasional mirage, hallucinating cities through a screen of black jungle, imagining balconies, windows, even the soft flutter of curtains teasing the nakedness of manmade light, imagining all this in the cicatrice-web of blue-gray shadows where nothing breathes except a panther, its prey, and an uprush of gulls
above the eglantine and elephant ears.
Lashed to the crow’s battered nest, tethered to the bone-bleaching sun, so long at sea as to be less man than god and a god gone mad. In fits and starts, like Time running backwards, like wine that glugs and spills through hot thin air till the bottle’s half-full, then filled, then finally corked, the pornographic purple of the label fixed and not yet picked apart by the slow obsession of the solitary watch.
Time is hunger and Time will be fed.
Hawk flying west calls down to me, where I stagger along the surf’s broken line as though looking for a gate, a door into Ocean, hoping to find the way across, away from Calypso’s island. I dream of heaven and I dream it lost. Prison is this pool of dreams, as much a prison now as home, that cell from which I sought release, not knowing what lay in the shadows across the courtyard, never imagining what lay waiting here, on the blue side of the gray sea.
When I return, no more lies. When I return, only children’s jokes, only heartbreak stories. No more lies, if I return. When or if? she laughs, and lingers over each small word. Calypso recites my journeys to me, numbering my infidelities with sly approval. She sets rank on each encounter, reveling in the trick by which I overpowered Circe. I scatter seashells, rake the sand, hide my tears, blame the sun. She rests beside me, feels my pulse with thumbs so light upon my eyelids, eight fingers tracing the cleverness of my skull, eight fingers she insists I name. Fragrant vanity, little tickler, innocent dawdler, perfumed cat, seductive serpent, hunchback slut, fiddler left and diddler right.
She leaps in transit, night on night, till darkness pyramids, small hours adding up to eclipse. Her memories are not the same as mine, though bite marks, stains, and welts abound. Within starlight’s imperfect parenthesis she lies face down, asleep, and nude. Offered in the garden’s mossed shadow, that stretch of heat beneath her skin’s cool curve, the twitched equipoise of beauty baffled by a bad dream. Silken finger, tongue, or thumb will open her like a flower.
Honeygold purrs, feline as a shift seen moving from ‘soon’ to ‘now’; graygreen coastline startling through a shred of fog; the dead jolt of landfall by night; thrushed red rush of wine on sand; silver brim of unstopped tears.
She will wait forever for me to wake her. I will break, forever, first. To take her and bring nothing back? Grailing me, she covers many leagues. Our spines take turn as keel, my knees our rudder, her hair our mast. I sigh the magic number of stars pricking her skyhigh ceiling. She sleeps face down, fist in her stomach, sweat tidal in its healing. She is my perfection and being that, becomes something frightening. She waits for me to enter.
Time is hunger and Time will be fed.
Calypso’s island has a pulse like a drunkard’s troubled sleep. An unrestful not-quite-sleep, filled with not-quite-dreams. Hammocked and blind and numb, tremor of insects moving through fur, fool’s gold shimmering beneath the skin. The heart an agitation no louder than an echo in a cove, the mind like a rattled shutter each time the wind rises in the trees. The forest, asleep in its own dark warmth. A floating fear swaddled in itself. Earth, roots, trunk, branches, leaves.
At night her body is a star I cannot help but follow. Inside, I am forever looking out. Forever is the chain of days and ribboned nights that I have been with her. A dog with fleas knows more of its condition than I of mine.
Seven years a tongue in the island’s bell. She watches me cultivate her garden, raking loose sand between pebbled channels.
I start, and wait, and listen. Someone’s coming, low across the horizon. To name me, without knowing what they’re looking at, to mock themselves for seeing a ghost. To fall silent and then to turn away. Hawk flying wrong way west again, naming the islands in its path.