Albatross

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