Again I am at sea. If this be faith, it is not the faith I bargained for when I gave that troubled half-life over; the slow sidereal day in trade for a guarantee the drift persuades me to consider. This morning lifting the shipboard cup from my lips into the hands of my judges, the cheap wine cloying my tongue, I see the rift clearly. Nothing — not words, the unlikely notice of scholars, not the face set toward a cruciform sun; least of all, the ritual meant to distract us — eases this passage. I have bargained everything away for the slow word, hard as science, for an uncertain page in the text of the future. Have taken in vain the name of God's mother, coupled it with foreshortened heaven. This is my home voyage, too fast to be wasted in anger. Call me a vessel come in from the peaks and valleys written in water. Blot out my name. Moored to my own tilted deck, I ride, I am riding the battered hulk to the ocean floor. |