Off the Ozarks' Tawny Shore
Pulling into port
of the embanked shoreline road cutting through the sea of gushing pines rolling as waves in hardwood over the ancient bodies of bedded stone, humped curls suspended, as I stand on deck at prow's rail.
Perhaps not hieroglyphics
but letters on knotty jetty wall sprayed with waterfalls of dust by eroding time, hypnotic in its lull of deliciousness, paralyzing in its ebb.
Pocket-knife chiselings
stream through vertical flotsam as messages in a bottle bobbing unnoticed until reaching their destination.
Becalmed on the Dalian sea,
fixed between burnished scallops inanimate to the droplets of birds splashing into the silent sky, mists of voyagers debark among tawny shores. Remember the sound of the many birds penetrating the wake of their passage, the skipping over ochre foam to rest on a last green island?
Waiting for a breeze,
a good, strong wind to fill the sails that will take us in.
Everything has been taken care of.
The broad knoll of the churchyard, away in an inlet beyond the shore, has felt our standing on its peeping brow contemplating jetsam of earlier cruises in its polished granite ripples and mossy concrete wash.
Waiting for a breeze
to engage us in navigating predictable crests of answering phones, running errands, dropping lifeboats for the swamped and overwhelmed.
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French Helmet |
