And the ship sailed on.

7

 
The river slipped through fog, and mist, and rain.
The Amazon was brooding, fanned by waves
of sullen heat.  Exploratory faces gave
the ship a garland for its rim (straining,

 
staring outward)... yet that humid blur
(airy water, watery air) merely
mirrored their imaginations (barely).
Silence offered them a nameless murmur;

 
each face on the circumference was faced
with someone's solitary thought.  The river
bore them onward; forward, toward a sterner,
saltier conclave (where the current was erased).

 
Never have I felt so far from home,
my magnetite.  Yet was the shore a-brim
with voices.  Someone spoke, they echoed him;
swift was the shuttlecock, empty the game.

 
The river bears a secret life, a bidden
Name (muttered through the wooden fountains
of the hard-pressed palms; risen through rain
into an iridescent orchid garden).

 
Unwitting fog-scouts hear it whispered, sometimes,
on the borderlands, where lonesomeness weighs
heavily - where all the sailors, Jonahs
are, their sisters, doves (tattoos, rhymes)...

 
Iris always beyond the pale for that lone
galoot (whose dreams, in fact, are signs
of a scythèd Guadaloupe - whose rose aligns
with swells of hay) adieu'd on the gramophone.