From the ship of life I see
walls, ports, fences,
barrels, orbits, the containing.
I feign no hypothesis.
Talk to me about years remaining,
talk to me about wear and tear.
Ptolemy accounted for planetary orbits
viewed from earth, by adding epicycles,
epicycles to epicycles. In his world
planets performed the loop-the-loop,
which became a child’s game,
given up for smart phone warfare.
Today, 11:30 a.m., I don’t believe
“all time is eternally present.”
I walk door to door,
the Universe appears and will disappear,
finally end with hunger,
no light or darkness left.
When I was 17, a seaman,
I learned death was not a bookend.
I saw friends’ bodies, half-afloat, half-sinking
off the bloody Atlantic shelf.
I would not eat bloody bread.
On duty, I accused an anti-Catholic,
anti-Black officer of sedition.
I sang, “Trust thou in the Lord.”
I did not trust Him,
I was establishing my heart.
At liberty, I scribbled near Asylum Street,
“Timothy was right”:
the love of money is the root of all evil.
Out to sea, I asked where are the dorsal fins
going when I first read Gerard Manley Hopkins,
I was thrown against a bulkhead: I saw
him, her, formal and informal you, we, they in russet clad
swim every day in the English Channel or China seas—
while ice-cutting poetry word by word
makes its way at five beat, ten knots
to Soviet Murmansk, then reverses course
south to and through no one’s Antarctic.
A song nobody sings outside my window:
You are my sea of loneliness,
sure as the sky is sometimes blue, I and you,
temporary pronouns, in the country and in the towns,
all past, present, and future—old wives’ tales,
last words, personal, particular, concrete.
All architecture is finally dust.
On the ship of life, I have a hammock, not a berth.
I swing with the ocean, forward, halfway back,
then forward again,
thousands of miles of breakers, green and blue,
mountains of choirs and soloists, prosody
of the oceans, the meter and free forms, translations,
lyric communion.
Despite the parallel lines of the Psalms,
Einstein proved parallel lines, like tram tracks
in Zurich, eventually meet. His time and space
versus Henri Bergson’s “No certainty,
probability, duration, Claude Debussy.”
Henri vs. Albert: uncertainty versus certainty
with no up and down, no right and left before
and after. All time eternally present, tonal
and atonal. Parallel lines meet—
just look down the railroad tracks
toward the horizon, Igor Stravinsky. Firebirds.
There is no dark lady of the bawdy planets.
I refuse to live in places out there
without a sun, East or West—without a stage.
Backstage, made up, facing my mirror,
being and acting. The play’s the thing:
The sexual Universe has his menstrual.
The lonely universe attracted by a beauty
pulls another universe into bed,
knows what black holes are made for.
The unripeness and unreadiness all.
Can the truth be triangles, circles,
a universal romance?
The word, the meaning of Another,
becomes every part of speech, re-Babeled languages.
I hear, I do not see, the play.
I think the planets are God’s castanets.
He is a flamenco dancer, Creation, dark song.
Every fingernail a star, I have my hands full:
a half moon is a relic, fires are sometimes frozen.
I wear a worm, a ring around my finger.
The way I tell time: I sell time by the dozen,
12 noons and 12 midnight eggs.
You can eat time scrambled, hard-boiled,
as an omelet or soufflé Grand Marnier.
* * *
This poem is a blind actress walking in town
without a dog or cane. Blind poetry makes
right guesses, before and after.
She walks in beauty like the morning,
crosses the street
without tripping, wishes Good Morning
to strangers. She can tell where she is
by their replies or silences.
She smiles at lampposts and trees,
speaks to them as if they were listeners.
We are on good terms, often speak.
She does not see the blackness in the dark.
Sometimes she can see blinding light,
beside her two thieves, Day and Night.