I
Desire, if ever found,
if ever hauled up with a deep hook
and stripped
of its algae and rust
and sanded down
and burnished to its new
seawashed sheen
(a smoothness, an interiority
exposed)
might save. That lucky ship
is years gone from the harbor,
no word delivered home
though the crew
surely wrote at every port.
Turning away from you
and you from me
in our bed, falling into shared
silence in a curtained room
is perhaps like this,
or perhaps
nothing like this.
II
Some men carved
their wives’ faces
into the whales’ teeth
they saved
from the try-pots—
in their bunks
(their lamps lit
with spermaceti) they caressed
the horned pearl
or in fair weather worked
on deck. The slip
of a finger might make her
a mermaid, leg-line
curling into a tail—
or give her a child
clinging to the hem
of her woolen dress.
III
And looking up at a sky
without a city
to blunt it
(I never said
I was lonely)
is a wonder:
the cetacean world
cavorts in the heavens.
How to explain the depth
(I never said it but perhaps
it still was true)
—the depth of such desire
not to have a body
at all, but be
phosphorescent?
In other words
be the flame
not pilot light
but fire in service
of itself.
Jeremy Miranda, Untitled (oil on canvas)