A Reef

A red and grey striped wool cap sits on his head, holding the place of a miter,

a wreath of rose thorns, a wrought-iron crown. “Think of your family!”

He pleads against silence, the only implacable foe;

a hundred cymbal crashes and odes concerning beauty

wash against it without ever eroding from that towering citadel half a grain of sand.

He hears the waves and the screams of those that had been saved

(the others are less loud than the surf,

quiet as the dawn of battle in all its ravening glory).

The well-kept imagination of the man born for a life devoid of shorelines

hears the water creeping as a million rats creep through the city of the dead.

It hears the hull creaking like the floorboards creak in the shack of the Grey Sisters.

“The time! Earthshaker as witness, my captain, we must go now!

We are the last but the storm will not wait! Honor is satisfied!”

The sailor waits two or three moments then wails in animal frustration and leaves

the doorway bare. A thunderbolt teases across the sky, its roar closely following.

The captain’s hands are thick with tendons, his fingers are white

as the sun-bleached bones that fall in dustless deserts. He murmurs.

“After decades of courtship, my beloved comes to me

with a golden ring shining bright upon her arm. How impatient she is,

now that she has made her choice! Very well, very well.

I come now to her bedchamber to accept promises,

and to let her know the sort of man she has consented to marry.”