Talking to Winslow

Talking to Winslow

after Homer’s Fog Warning

It’s a long way to row alone Winslow

Homer, two halibut in the dory and the ship

a vapor a shift a good way off.  You got your man looking

up into a sky piggybacking fog.  You got him

paused, oars two needles

on the compass rose.  And a couple white- as- his-

wife’s- breasts best catch dead in a stern

they’re too big for.  How long does he pause in the living

fog, that pack of not yet gone wild dogs stretching, turning, the prow

the yard the masts a new snap in the wet

lavender air…how long before he goes

down or aboard?  How long in the coming?  How distant

is his woman’s spine

from his lips that slide up and down

the panted wave of it?  Is that soot bruise below the boat,

and the liquid obsidian surge churning to empty it all,

all into the sea a shade you create or is it an accident

cleaving?   The humidity, the freeze, the dregs

of turpentine? How long do you spend

and spend and spend, blush or blue, on the same

fins and skin, how long are you in the man

in the boat before you never ever leave it, never can,

even if it makes it back, the halibut weighed,

the brandy choked or stowed, everything ducked

and dunked while the trance of a woman in pearls

is an image unaided, a refraction of the water

you could never create for the still of it.