You can tell I feel lonely,

at the port of embarkation
and no ship,
not even a passing cloud.

Africa is beyond reach,
and there are no islands,
remember, where types
like me can brash ashore.

If I got there at all
I would have to simper and smile
up the beach by night
and hope the terns don’t screech
to give my pilgrimage away.

You can see I have been there before,
the island of Anyone But Me.

But it’s time to leave
so I have to walk out on the sea
singing her name
who sent me.

Anyone can do it,
just linger in the image–
I walked across the Thames
to Lambeth once
dry-shod in an ordinary dream—

I felt a little fear
but not much now,
just the salty tang
of being where I shouldn’t be–
there is a kind of pleasure there,
you know how it is,
the window’s dirty
but the sky is clean.

Recall how the song began:
across the frozen Baltic
to the gates of Troy
on foot to free her
from winter…

something like that.
The land is nowhere near me ow–
I must be almost there.

(Epyllion they would have called this song, a little scrap of epic leading nowhere. But here we anywhere are.)

                                                           28 August 2020