Spacious latitude cuts spheres in swathes
of land and sea, a pattern in the chaos—
in mean time, downright cruel time
at that meridian point where in oceans
the date line turns its tide and waves,
I find that I am lost
You aboard ships, in love,
under wraps, out in all weathers,
prepositional to all of life
reading classics in your down time
while I learn alphabets, sums, and
how to navigate the globe of fathers’ furies
my compass spinning madly searching—
I found you, once, magnetic north
Only, what? forty years since,
a mere rill, a mote of time on
the telescope’s ground lens.
I hear the breaking down of engines,
distant grinding, pitch and roll
and other circumventions,
the deep doldrumming fester,
no breath of wind, not mine, nor yours,
silent in the still.
Without exactitude
there’s no way to find you—
those hours, degrees, minutes, seconds, lost.
You in latitudes unknown
where purposes cross
and no signal can be heard
through all the dross, precision
has turned woolly, fugged, untrue
I cannot read the signs of wind,
weathervane, not compass points,
nor the stars, and no charts guide me—
I find I am forlorn, for I am lost