Elegy for Olive Oyl (3rd prize: 2014 Competition)

I’ll go back to painters and whistles, shipwreck gardens

Turk’s Heads, leaden hearts and let the winds their revels keep.

I’ll go back to the water for something to put the ghost back

in me, as no one says. Your body gestured commensurate with

mastheads asway blindingly against the sun, sowing sunspots on

the horizon: I bears this image in mind. You, and you

knowing all your dazzled life that nothing always haunts at its edges

something, being much larger and altogether more convincing.

I bears in mind your grey camisole the morning we almost married.

I singing into your sleep like a pebble lobbed at your bedroom window.

I sang up a work song, you threw me a dresser.

I sang up a work song I’m working to finish.

My first language was Sailortown pidgin, my palette’s on fire with salt.

My sweetest voice still is vinegared plums, a thousand tobacco plugs

stiffen my tongue.

The sad-sackery of all this doesn’t escape me, darling.

My posy wilts at the cold milk bottle: spilling is in its essence so it spills.

The knot weakens the rope. If we won’t marry, retell me the dream of twins –

each of them was me you said their breaths rattled your clapboard walls

you said their forearms were the size of melons you said.

I haven’t thrown a punch in years now the old buffoon is underground.

I can’t put my arms to work, my chest is tight as frozen oak.

There’s nothing here for me to haunt – I bears this in mind.

I anticipate better weather but there’s no sea change –

the sea being always water. Once, I folded

a ship’s overbite over itself; propellers twirled like pinwheels.

Laugh like that again! & let the winds their revels keep.

I want to be light as every floating thing.

I’m ready to shove off. I’m ready, I promise.

I’ve been trying to eat more spinach.