Currents
by Beth Sherman
Almost an island, I balanced on my boat’s sides
Rapacious blond-eyed birds, their dung, their screams.
I drifted on. Through fragile tangled lines
Drowned men, still staring up, sank down to sleep.
-- Rimbaud
Almost a vision.
But not really.
The boat fills with water,
muddy brown, speckled with algae
and skeletons of forgotten starfish,
a flounder who stares at me with flat black eyes
The hook still fixed in his mouth, which
opens and says: Bail
This far out, birds follow in the boat’s wake,
loons, terns, once a pelican.
They must be tired from flying so far, all that soaring and skimming.
I wait for them to settle on the sides of the dinghy,
claws firmly gripping the weathered planks,
wait for the water to reach my earlobes,
for night to cover me like a soggy blanket.
I expect song.
The boat drifts on, spinning through currents.
I lost the oars years ago. Incredible to realize you can
subsist on a diet of sunshine and air.
Salt clings to me like barnacles,
crystalline white, hardening, solid, all that’s
left except for my shell.
A toast to disappearing! To Shakespeare and green olives!
To the last bitter rays of light fading as briskly as love.
Ophelia wore a crown of weeds
drowning ‘neath the brook in her
white virgin’s gown.
Painterly . . . delicate. . . highly iconic.
This disappearing act is far less poetic.
My skin shriveled, my bones exposed,
Gyroscope Review 4! 7