The Unreturning

Blue is my sky peter
and white my frayed gull.
We had begun to sail
into the milky magma,
the gull’s cry
and the moon’s tail
beyond the glassy ports and the squeaking cordage
where the long waves leap
and the crests of wind reform their ragged continents.

Voices that cry out at the world’s end
or here on the sea’s anvil,
fraught with space, will have no ears.
All sights and sounds are a perished wake,
are the lost bearings of the unfound star
which hides no haven in a waxing light.
Attempts to measure the sun’s long spoke by day
in a ladder of cloud
will make no way
through the wrinkled shroud.

There will be no world there when we are there,
and no one to know, even the lone hand
at the wheel
whose face is caught in a tanned and wrinkled dream.

Drugged by water and wind
into the dream of the water’s vertical eye,
armed with no measure of the fathom’s track
we sink and die
and rise again unknown,
and knowing no release
no certain bound,
our misty bodies die and rise
and are nowhere found to us who never cease
and never return to the lost world
or new world found.