THE FERRY PIRATE
(VARIATIONS)
When the brain's black with demonic crisis
and its inky sea peopled with lights
that prompt memory, loved sou ls
are borne out on the wake from hi gh boatsides
and in that world of waters fl oat lit rooms
wandering away to past sunsets. Swaying,
the terrain of darkness lost to you.
And a lways a mother ashamed to have suffered,
always marriages left inland,
always the sea carrying out black pram covers,
the wandering of unsteady thoughts;
then the
whispering at the captain's voice tube says:
"When I came early to my new love, Cariclea,
I found her kinsfolk weeping
for he r old love and she far too faithful,
despite the sea changing either through time or fortune,
and I carried her away across the b lackening waters."
You won't find quite this in Heliodorus.
That sea is always fairly near
under the rails of night ferries ,
sway ing with unsteady thoughts, blackening in cris is ,
roughening with time or fortune, drawn on
by inkless nibs, as if the written surface
were integral with liquid rooms of memory
distorted in the currents undersea.
\
