Sunday, February 28, 2016

Mare

Mare
On the strand
My gaze towards the sea
With you I feel at one
Words drift towards me on the wind
Then dryly fall
Dry as the sandbar in the distance.

A splash of sunlight on my shoulder
The muffled wash of incoming waves
Above which the shrill laughing
Children's voices tumble
And in the midst of all this tumult
The discovery
That stills all else to silence:
The great ocean
That seems to have no end.

Mare
A splash of sunlight on your shoulder
Your hair that shines
From the glinting, spattering water:
A mermaid.
I pick up the shell
That lies at my feet
A house, a deserted house
Of an animal:
Angel wing.
Sometimes I feel like the animal
Sometimes the house, the shell
Together with you.

Mare
Later, much later
The image drifts up once more
On the ocean of my dreams
Takes on different forms
But never, never again
As on that day
On which you and I
Formed an unshakeable one-ness
With the ocean
As in an ancient covenant.


Sunday, February 7, 2016

The Young Cartographer


“Daughter,” said my father,
“You will never leave these shores!”
He meant well, I know,
but in my mind I have already left.

Even now I watch him, a small cloaked figure
receding on the shoreline,
receding in the distance.
Even now, my pen draws out my coming voyage,
leaving a stark white wake
escorted by the screech of gulls
and the writhing coils of sea monsters,
and others must follow if they dare.

I stand upon the deck of my imaginings,
bracing myself against the squalls,
against the swell of green water,
against the wave-tossed billows,
against the unknown deeps
that are my surrounding charts.

My pen creates islands, whole continents,
archipelagos and inlets, which only exist
because I have drawn them.
My outstretched hands
span trackless oceans of parchment,
at last to sight a distant undiscovered shore.

Already I have made landfall,
already I am on that shore.
Even now, without leaving my study
I set out to discover this new and unknown land
which is myself.




Painting by Donato Giancola