return voyage

Haven’t heard my voice in months,

Found it singing “eili, eili” over slanted waters,

Found it skimming over dangerous waters

Like a black loon in the sun.

What is it in us that finds itself in the world?

When we cut the engine and float by

The seal colony like an envoy, politic

And distant, all I can hear is cries of pain.

My grandmother is behind me in this boat

And behind her her mother and her mother.

I am watching her face these days—

The awe in it, the surrender that

Time does claim some things

Like a gradual growing tide—

When we buried him she did not cry

But she was ugly for a moment, something

Was tearing her face and then it was gone.

Then she was just watching us shoveling dirt.

“The island doesn't change” I say

and I hope as I bring my love

here to these creaking docks,

these salt stained fields for the first time—

but its borders have shrunk

and the shallow bits covered in broken

shells stretch on now, and even

our hidden bits, the depths untouched

by sun or everyday use, are scarred

by the storms we weather.

Even as I feel the first poem

Coming on like first light

Cutting into a dream--

The fog rolls in, thin and cool,

And we have to wait before

We can go home.