sentinel

from well – assembled

“The middle of the journey, before the sands are reversed: a place of ideal quiet.”

– John Ashbery, ‘The New Spirit’, 1970

Lower now, slow dropping like syrup, the kind of light that wrings out pinkness in the grey-green firs so that they rosy glow and soften into sky behind –– a feather’s halfway formlessness. God’s own country.

So many rings in the kinks of his hair. Rays crest on nose crooked, sunstreak spanning a horizon off-kilt. You, cast in his shadow. The print of his profile on yours, imagining it might take hold, as he has beneath in subskin veins. There, and with you always. Later tapped, latent solace.

Shadows playing in the dashboard dent, lilypads in plastic pond. Fields unfurl beyond the half-rolled window, great grass manuscripts. Hand ahold the wheel tender, his old estate hugs the road’s wind through hedgerows; axles pull and ease, ruts by suspension softened. The gentle motion of a small boat in coastal waters. Your back rubbed red, a head towel’s labyrinth imprinted. Overdoming distant vault, and a blinding solar trail woven right, left, right of the mast. Her hull rocks cotlike, heathaze slack and spreadeagled upon you. Some complacencies like this sit deep as unknown blues that anchor out the bottom-heavy sealine. Asquint, a girl or seraph alcoved in a window arch reclining, checking the cut of trousers at her ankle, cabin curtain wings abillow. She’ll stay with you until you sleep. Until you wake.

As in youth, a lucid snag at the handbrake’s creak, bafflement at this sudden night. Beyond Emil, a familiar cabin porchlight’s spilling well. Home again, home again. Feeling rested? Despite the dark, those errant dreamsuns dancing still across his watchful face.