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Michele Leggott – Ⅲ

I dreamed your book was written and the great So praised it

The boat is called Becoming Strong and it lifts off the river each morning dispersing the mists with every stroke of its golden oars.

Then it’s a beetle sculling across heaven into the new world, dancing on the meniscus, barely a ripple to show for the circumambient miracle.

At midday the boat puts up a sail and gathers speed. It is so high the rowers can lean on their oars and look over the side. Do they see us resting too in the feathery shade of this acacia?

We were down in the hollow, we were laughing and jumping.

You were alive in my heart and light as a feather, a blue bird stripped to a string of pearls walking up the lapis road.

You made light with your feathers. You made air with your wings. Because of you the boat speeds along, a scarab ringed with copper and gold, a little cartouche of waves.

Now the boat is called Becoming Weak and every muscle strains to reach the doors of the sky before they close on this day forever. A perfect heart is broken as the boat slides through, leaving us desolate by a salty sea.

But who has died? The boat glides on, a night sun now on the eastern side of the Lake of Flowers. You’re eating cakes at the captain’s table. You measure the speech of other hearts. You rewrite an old script.

You are ambiguous, a hummingbird in a nest of sand. Wild Rose, you are a production in yourself.

Let my heart be with me in the House of Hearts. Let my heart-case be with me in the House of Heart-cases. I wear you in a silver ring about my neck. I listen for your call.

Miracle boat, all I have is the sound of your waves reaching shore. They slap the seawall with big hands or fall at my feet with a sigh. They tell me you are not lost. They tell me you journey on the ocean of the sun.

They tell me the sun will rise.


 

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