Fifteen years I have known your face only now not to know the face that sex reshapes, that sculptress in flesh who roughs your lip with a sooty smudge, casts your features to her ambition, and molds you anew to her necessity, while your cheeks are still soft with my child. Your mind is in the same transition, one foot still caught in the childhood glue of model ships of sea or space of heroes bland as vanilla pudding, while the other checks tentatively another world blazed by the phosphorescent tentacles of jellyfish and meteros. It is difficult being two people, but more difficult to leave one behind to play forever with lullaby pirates chased by the crocodile who ticks a countdown to the alarm of life. The other self at the slip of voyage reads in your darkened room where over bricks and Brooklyn traffic the wind blurts the sea through your window as the command is surrendered from Hook to Kirk to Ahab - the maimed captain embedded in the self. Landlocked in my life, I wave a Quaker handkerchief from the dock, knowing the ship you set out in has no oars, leaks, is lost in space. But sea and stars are still the same where wonder looms a white blindness. Struck with all men's weaponry, that animal whom we never fathom turns with us lashed to its flank and sounds. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL by KATHARINE LEE BATES NO BABY IN THE HOUSE by CLARA G. DOLLIVER WHAT OF THE DARKNESS?; TO THE HAPPY DEAD PEOPLE by RICHARD THOMAS LE GALLIENNE MILTON; SONNET by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW THE LITTLE HILL by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY AN OLD BATTLE-FIELD by FRANK LEBBY STANTON |