12-07-2025, 12:12 AM
Fishing For War
I
Sailing from end to end,
youth in arms,
sealing lines left on the table:
an iron skull bores the mast.
No one recognizes the brain's parlor,
or paltry shoes, when adjacent
pallor is shark-hard ripping vision.
The sentence, landlocked wholly
by the very sea: slides
like with shoehorn and sardine
oil, heart in sandals:
brakes against the rushing tide,
the foreign craft disparages.
A motor mixes beats between
two heavens.
The transit horizons align
a time and a stolid mercy;
crusted as the shoreline no one
hides.—Captive as innocence, the hardened
cabin returns. And out on deck, official
jettisons tear back the logbooks' pages.
II
Sleet salts the deck, admission and board
obliges swollen remainders that bilge and porter,
dryly carpeting the abattoir.
Charging merit now, instead of flags
of groggy comfort. Time sits a stool
a casted plank, a plant seated for a prank.
Nothing to prove, and moments leak
in sleek seconds. Slick yet dully chiming on
holy mainland,
detergent-cascade caroling, shining maritime
festivals bore through the grey parlor
with the infinite mundane chatter of seagulls,
unheard yet spattering nerves.
Sinking for water, dry as kites,
somewhere, something whistling knots
the ferriswheel of change with clowning
certainty: The compass is a radio not a home.
Transmission bleaching the entire sea with sound.
Wheezing the canal out of shape.
III
It follows that this dappled sage is no
christmas fool.
No dog or dead house walls such fire in.
There will be another barque which assuages
this sibilance of sirens, thrice aloft the carnal,
stern as hoarders.
Rancid clouds ply outward.
Rain comes from under, as new vision
creases the straight fence,
welcoming danger through crevices of broad day.
No night stranger than breakfast whines
in broader strokes, heralding debarkations.
A keener, swarthy spring.
Cables in the mailhouse drifting Awake!
The sunday sidewalk slumbering parts the waves
for nascent novelty:
a common broadcast of striding appearance
turns oracles of starfish slain.
Founding nothing new that which is everything.
The wide ocean is abandoned.
IV
Age and nothing shy still milks the marrow.
Searching for more or less
depends on the shore, the room.
Red as drunken-faced urchins floating boats
on dinnerboxes; the table is too low
and wind narrow.
Shark returns as hair on the eyes.
The styrofoam steam is no greater love
chewing on mail and waxpaper,
news and glass and paper barnacles
scissoring the horizon.
The old sun irrefragable with mortality;
waking is the bottomline of the day.
After dinner, time grows eely.
Wintervanes stiff as gluey puddles.
Once an eye, the surface crumbles
as skin and toast and crabcaked mornings.
A cataract bends space and time.
Starboard harbored, the marble soul-sibyl left
a lustered painted fountain.
I
Sailing from end to end,
youth in arms,
sealing lines left on the table:
an iron skull bores the mast.
No one recognizes the brain's parlor,
or paltry shoes, when adjacent
pallor is shark-hard ripping vision.
The sentence, landlocked wholly
by the very sea: slides
like with shoehorn and sardine
oil, heart in sandals:
brakes against the rushing tide,
the foreign craft disparages.
A motor mixes beats between
two heavens.
The transit horizons align
a time and a stolid mercy;
crusted as the shoreline no one
hides.—Captive as innocence, the hardened
cabin returns. And out on deck, official
jettisons tear back the logbooks' pages.
II
Sleet salts the deck, admission and board
obliges swollen remainders that bilge and porter,
dryly carpeting the abattoir.
Charging merit now, instead of flags
of groggy comfort. Time sits a stool
a casted plank, a plant seated for a prank.
Nothing to prove, and moments leak
in sleek seconds. Slick yet dully chiming on
holy mainland,
detergent-cascade caroling, shining maritime
festivals bore through the grey parlor
with the infinite mundane chatter of seagulls,
unheard yet spattering nerves.
Sinking for water, dry as kites,
somewhere, something whistling knots
the ferriswheel of change with clowning
certainty: The compass is a radio not a home.
Transmission bleaching the entire sea with sound.
Wheezing the canal out of shape.
III
It follows that this dappled sage is no
christmas fool.
No dog or dead house walls such fire in.
There will be another barque which assuages
this sibilance of sirens, thrice aloft the carnal,
stern as hoarders.
Rancid clouds ply outward.
Rain comes from under, as new vision
creases the straight fence,
welcoming danger through crevices of broad day.
No night stranger than breakfast whines
in broader strokes, heralding debarkations.
A keener, swarthy spring.
Cables in the mailhouse drifting Awake!
The sunday sidewalk slumbering parts the waves
for nascent novelty:
a common broadcast of striding appearance
turns oracles of starfish slain.
Founding nothing new that which is everything.
The wide ocean is abandoned.
IV
Age and nothing shy still milks the marrow.
Searching for more or less
depends on the shore, the room.
Red as drunken-faced urchins floating boats
on dinnerboxes; the table is too low
and wind narrow.
Shark returns as hair on the eyes.
The styrofoam steam is no greater love
chewing on mail and waxpaper,
news and glass and paper barnacles
scissoring the horizon.
The old sun irrefragable with mortality;
waking is the bottomline of the day.
After dinner, time grows eely.
Wintervanes stiff as gluey puddles.
Once an eye, the surface crumbles
as skin and toast and crabcaked mornings.
A cataract bends space and time.
Starboard harbored, the marble soul-sibyl left
a lustered painted fountain.