Off the coast of Freeport, the Bahamas

It is blood to remember; it is fire
To stammer back... It is
God—your namelessness. And the wash—
--Hart Crane

1.

Neon churns up from the jet-char depths,
folded up into the long,
gasping wake.

I stand here, enraptured—
maybe in the way
Hart Crane was in these same waters
before he climbed over the high railing,
waved
and let himself fall
into the murk.

Not murk though.
It’s neon, as I said.
It a glorious deepness.
And it’s easy—
easier than anything—
to disappear into.
It’s so easy to let our flesh,
our picked-clean bones,
descend into the swell.
It’s easy to gasp
last in this dark isolation
crying out to the wind and waves
what the nuns on the Deutschland did
that cold Advent day—
Christ, O Christ.

I would cry out too if I could
certainly during my long fall
into the deep.

2.

I opened my ribboned Office Book—
the worn leather fingered almost gray—
and in the midst of psalms and canticles
cadenced into prayer
I find myself listing those closest in thought
to what I petition.
Mother. Father—
whose thoughts bring with them
an ache deeper than the phantom dull ache
I have carried with me all day.
Shirley—
who is slowly
being erased as the record of her life
plays slowly backward.
The soul of Stuart—
who I saw just last week as he
rocked back and forth,
slowly being disconnected
from his wife and his children and his life
by the cancer.
And then finally the one I think of
obsessively on this trip—
the soul of Hart,
who lies two thousand feet beneath me.
Or his precious sand does anyway.

3.

And you! O you!
You I list as well,
you whose name I recite at least twice
each day in these petitions.
You I think of in this place
you I imagine here with me
in this dark glory,
this churning light,
as you once were
in a place not much different than this.

I look into the waters
and recite your name.
The wind takes it from my lips
and casts it into the wake
that trails us in deep water troughs.
There, as it escapes my sight
into the dark and neon,
I see it does not touch the swell even once.
It lightens there,
tossed and flung,
dancing as if it could—
hard consonants and all—
until it disappears finally
lost to me
out my aching reach.

For all my petitions,
this is the one that failed consistently.
And its failure is, I realize,
only now, in this dark night,
the answer.
It is not the one I wanted.
It is the one word I resisted.
Just that simple one.
No.
I struggled against it
and against all that it negates
and takes from me.
Still, I accept it
and watch
as your name rises once again
from the dark wave,
a perfectly-shaped shadow atop the neon water,
persistent as the ocean.

4.

Above, a cloud so ghostly it chills, follows us.
It is as a large as the world!
Or how would Neruda have said it?

la oscuridad del archipiélago

Hart Crane—
despairing as he was—
manic on that last voyage—
no doubt still
even then
was enraptured by clouds—
certainly clouds made so vibrant
against this certainly-false blue.

And that salt, I know full well,
musty have been salt in his open
emotional wounds.

We’ve all known it.
We’ve all—
in those moments—
been tempted to step off into the blue
to leave the wounds and scars and phantom aches behind
and to reach out instead to whatever lies
out there, ahead of us—
embracing it
and hoping
as he I’m sure did
to be embraced back.

February 5, 2010