after The Voyage of Saint Brendan
First: darkness and nothing.
Then, a swell of darkness,
my hands so small inside it.
Ahead, I see the sheep,
tiny cathedrals
glowing on the island.
They walk their night
like a blindness,
their island an eye
plucked from its socket,
and its pasture
the way earth tries to see
in the world of water.
These are the lambs
that shepherds once carried
across their necks.
They wait here, listening
for their return—
for they know
their masters’ voices—
they do not come
nor scatter; they hover,
little clouds,
motes in the eye
that cannot assemble me.
I lay down—
I lay among them
and slept like a shadow
as you sleep in the night
of my skull, among
the soft-bright bodies
long dead, and the whirring
black flowers.