On Many Islands by Ray Coleta

In his eyes her image began to fade.

To become mostly a shade of blue.

Pine-scent now muted in the colors of the sea.

Which the white flotsam above concealed.

Another time, in a world of red and black:

A figure had risen, to show a raft-wanderer (clinging),

The murkiness underneath.

The sea was a veil before the eyes.

The great figure swayed under the darkness.

Long memories swayed with the current.

And in the grays of another world,

Where movement’s shadow remained exposed:

With storm’s tint, heavy.

The islands were unaware of turbulence underneath.

But with the graves/long conversations were had.

Dripping hands, finger’s sea-weed tangled; Clutched,

At the cliffs to peer into the vortex of the bowl tree.

An expecting spot under temple’s dome.

The old stories sung again.

In the energies under the earth.

In the tendrils and knots of the human form.

***

And I felt myself adrift.

Time torrential.

I was battered and beaten by

The hail and streaks of rain cutting,

The image of

The pond, reflected,

Light so gentle, to put to motion

A dance.

A voice may have said to me: ‘you are like a moth drawn.’

And long conversations were then lost in the ether.

I walked at the edges of the page.

Among the lemon trees and at the end of the earth.

Into the vortex of the bowl tree, reflected back.

Was ancient olive’s gnarled stone.

A testament to the old hills rising over.

Ever-morphing, and with melting limbs.

Oh yes, she walked with me against the hills.

My search stopped abruptly in the air over Deià,

The white seas,

What a nice garden,

And view from the window.

There was a bowl glazed in white,

The grainy color of the glacier.

Its blue lip under Neptune’s storm.

Laid out, and stretched to the horizon,

The ghost of

Tethys’s ocean-gaze.

Now I was only a phantom in the orchards, wandering.

Other’s voices forth from my mouth.

Come from all the great eras.

‘I,’ ‘I.’ Like pillars between.

Resounding off the buff shore rocks.

Visions of lives bisected.

The hills lost to a mighty fog.

From ships come, from the cold nights, comes

The shattered voice of longing.

Blue twilight on the hills,

And the sun so red.

Screams echo in the great hall.

And in the echos my own voice heard.

In the banquet hall I sit.

Hand in royal hand, her scribe.

To inherit another’s pain.

To rend.

Once tangerines now the ash-grove

From far away the scent on tidal winds.

My self spread out under a great dome.

Acid sun midday, that huge damn Sun.

So purely burning.

The young hunter finds shade in the coastal forest.

And an old man tangled in the ropes watches seabirds.

Circling carrion round the blinding orb.

But I sit under the lid of the death-mask.

Old and gray now.

As I walk slumped, she seems to have shaped this city.

Buildings made of scrub and the amphitheater empty.

A planet of rock so carefully carved out.

A bust a-swim in the eastern sky, its low-hanging branches.

I stop to see you,

Everywhere now.

In the fountain’s water plays.