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Poem
I see it now
flying low
over silver-spumed waves.

I am a watcher
I can enlarge the picture
        zoom in
look into bright midnight eyes
        as if it were I
that propelled it.

Spreading bright foils
catching the billowing blows,
a clean swell-rigged clipper
      sky-sailing sailor
tacking to gypsy winds.
Within its avian breast a magnetic compass
                     on a pivoting gimbal,
soon to make a terrible landfall.

For a ship came upon it
a craft arrayed in the guise of a cruel crocodile,

snagged from the air it snared the voyager.
A ship blighted by its own wake,
                                    a very flowering of evil.
A wandering navigator brutishly used,
deckhands bundling broken wings
bound it as if a flopping fish,
gaffed its body open

         to a hollow of hope.

I also recall a monstrous time
inside a crocodiles smile,
          a time when poetry
was cut from my lips.
Yet here I am flying
in an airplane looking down
upon England,
following an albatross
            only I can see.

Few crocodilians in London
yet more perilous reptiles there,
I shall have to take more care,
plot a fairy-tale revenge
with Peter Pan’s time-frozen statue.

                                At last to Paris
a windborne glide tracking a dream
of slow rowing wings,
there to dine with a restless ghost
who knows well enough
how dangerous monsters
can be

on land and sea.

 

There to restore myself

            with Baudelaire.
to remake over

an imagined albatross of a life,
return it to humanity,
should it ever want to be
                  that flightless.

~~~~~

“Often to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
this traveler but lately so adroit -
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.”

- Charles Baudelaire
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