The Sea Letters

                                              Tallahassee

From the window sunlight pierce the bodies
of clouds. I turn to watch them, all that water
in the sky, trapped in the shape of dolphins,
a family swimming through St. John’s River.
The beauty of a place is welded into us
like that parapet in Cambridge that I still see
in the afternoon of the world, its clay roasted
in fire; the patience of skill, the patience of movement,
something I know about, having been in the sky
for hours. The airplane turns toward Tallahassee
and the fields present themselves, green
and full of pride. The trees, too far from me
to know their names, stand so slender, eyelashes
in God’s eyes, so tender they wave in winds
of beauty, and on the river a tiny boat moves
toward home, leaving in its path a trail of water
on the belly of the world. O stars not yet out,
how I quake in the wake of wonder, all that beauty
so heavy I must take it in slowly or get drunk.
I, too, having walked the antebellum of the south
must come to the same conclusion the woman
on my right came to, the beauty of the world
was built in our blood. The plane taxies and I wonder,
in all the places I have been to why does love greets me
at the door with an effort sculpted by brutal labor?
Will I meet it today? When it says to me, welcome,
will I look in its eyes and say, there is a wall
we all must rest on; I hope you find yours?
And now I walk down the aisle, my hands before me,
a bride, a stranger seeking home. And the world reaches out,
not in the welcome of a prodigal but in the way
eternity swallows us, knowing fully well that we will drink
and not reach the end, still it gives what it can, mourning
our deaths into the summer sound of cicadas.