9
For at last my sailor has fallen into the enduring sleep,
and the stars have become a trillion guiding shorelines
in the centres of the unending eyes of the night skies,
our living light in the darkness of directionless desire.
At last my sailor has fallen into his greater dreaming,
where I will meet him, his long voyage abandoned.
His ship now given to the winds, set adrift and wildly
coursing a changing sea, of its own unnatural volition.
So let me take you to where it began, life mirrored in
liquid surfaces, since here you will never stop ending.
No love like our love. The wharf pylons salty creak
and the abandoned ships are captured in the corals
and the lighthouses search out the stormy waves
with you locked in my arms, your skin of barnacles.
No love like our love, on the edge of the rainbows
that end in the seas. You are never going to return.
You have been gathered into the arms of my song.
On the trail of moonlight that slips over the edge,
along the cliff faces of those lashing winter coasts
and the silent roll and churn of crests and troughs.
Deeper than time, we view you from the estuaries,
as you enter the whistling, singing, gurgling whales,
the floating drifting sonars and steady currents.
Our secret lives, our journeys, our veiled worlds,
our borders, our meetings, our partings in gales.
We surround all known land with our enduring love.
One day you will find me on your golden beach
and you will make ropes with my tangled hair,
and you will build your simple huts to sleep in,
and I will protect them from the tides and wind,
for sight and sense are keener in the sea-born
and sea intuition is sensitive to tectonic shifting.
