So
his mind sailed like the plate through black thunderheads
even in broad daylight, with no present or past,
like the moon that rose from the basin's foaming suds,
making dinner at dawn, and, at supper, breakfast.
He slept in Egypt and woke in Benin. Galleys
beat their oars to his fingers. He turned off the ring
of the stove and sensed its warm iris, like his eyes
as the flames turned blue, then rose, suddenly fading
with his sight. The coffee made his nostrils widen.
The dog scratched at the kitchen door for him to open
but he made it wait. He drummed the kitchen table
with his hand. Blackbirds were quarrelling for breakfast.
Except for one hand he sat as still as marble,
with his egg white eyes, his spoon repeating the past
of another sea, measured by stroking hammers.
o
open this day with the conch's moan , Omeros,
as they did in my boyhood, when I was a noun
gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise.
A lizard on the sea-wall darted its question
at the waking sea, and a net of golden moss
brightened the reef, which the sails of their far canoes
avoided. Only in you, across centuries
of the sea's parchment atlas, can I catch the noise
of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece
of the lighthouse's flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye
shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys
over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly.
In you the grey seeds of almonds guessed a tree's shape,
and the grape leaves rusted like serrated islands,
and the blind lighthouse, sensing the edge ofa cape,
paused like a giant, a cloud held high in its hands,
to hurl a boulder that splashed into phosphorous
stars, then a black fisherman, his stubbled chin coarse
