I go there often,
but I cannot write of it.
The Bay with its gray face,
the trolling swells of the waves,
the islands like moored ships,
my father, grizzled and gray
at the tiller of the Whistle Wing,
the great white wings of the boat
filling with dampness,
the fog spilling from the sails.
It is soul life, this place.
Why I refuse to give it up,
why it exists,
an exotica,
the real bread,
the clear tea,
the lemon sun.
All of it belongs to me
like an inward skeleton.
It holds me together
like the beams of a bridge.
I found openness in the bay,
the rare elemental of truth,
always being what it was.
It was later in the city
that I found depredation,
blankness, fragility.
People who never walked
with the spirit of the water,
who never tasted the tongues of ancestors,
threw wreathes upon the waves,
felt no tenderness in the arms of devotion.
The reeds parting for the gulls,
the lilies lying like pink and white baskets
on the pools.
One belongs to these doors
that open on shadows,
that release the whispers of angels,
that pull a man into the heart
of the living savannas of midges,
dragonflies,
the bonnets of herons and swans.
I don’t know why truth is rare
among the people of the city.
I don’t know why they need sirens.
I don’t know why they refuse
to leave those places
and return to selves
which were the gift of their childhoods.
I for one return to my place,
my Bay,
the islands,
the ship of my father,
and wish for nothing but the sun,
to rise and light up these dark places
I have gone to.