Now magic

Now magic
the stones 
tell stories of invisible oceans
flowing above us

Now magic
the last gold
sun tells stories
of your breath
caught

Now magic
the moon rises
and comes down
to your bidding

Now magic
The whispering lights
Say come here
here.

-	Copyright Kay Winter

Ocean song

Time has slowed,
Or even stopped
In places.

I walk under water,
under sailor’s stars,
under stranded ships
down and down through
unknown valleys.

At last I hear the ocean’s song
long, wretched, glorious
drawing the continents back together.

-	Copyright Kay Winter

Collage Poem: White Beach

I went into a white sky
over a white beach.

Out farther
out at sea
a blue current
on a postcard with a picture
someone else took
long before I arrived.
– Copyright Kay Winter

Across the Sea

Do you remember the passage
back to Spain?
The nights alone
when everyone but us
faded into the chatter
and light we’d left inside
to find the night Atlantic
and the foggy black endlessness
so far below our clasped
and promised hands?

Copyright Kay Winter

Ocean Metal Cloud

The day is like an ocean
of clear metal
tepid, muted, greengray, salty, fragrant with seamoss,
I smell the distant sounds of sunlight from above.
Ishmael and I stroll the early morning fog
on the pier in Grand Marais
and we are nothing like water at all.

But wait, what I really want to tell you
is that I still feel cold from that winter I spent in Thunder Bay,
killing two birds with one stone.

But today, the sea air causes the waves to freeze in place
(but only above the water line).
Ishmael says he wants a double-double at Timmy’s
and I want nothing, I say, the fragrant cloud of forgetting
and the erasure of memory is all that I want to remember.
Ishmael doesn’t want to sail, ever, or stay on land.
Katydid will go sailing, someday soon,
with vapor boats that do not need to float.
The clouds are all secret boats, it’s a fact.
“Wolken sinken wie Blei,” says a lonely dolphin,
swimming past.
The ocean replies with cloud and metal.

Lies

As you fall,
you tell yourself lies:
That you’ll dive in safely.
That you have become water.
That the sea has filled you already.
That the surface is visible, fragile, harmless
and that the deeps will welcome you.

But the black stone inside
is cold with truth:
Somewhere,
deep down,
there,
(prepare your heart)
the sea cometh upon us all.

– Kay Winter and Seamus Kennan

Castaway

Mountain peaks drift
away from earthroots
shimmerveiled seasurfaces
await, indifferent to any sailing.

Shadowed islands
(as unmapped as you and I are)
wait for us to cast our tentative bodies
away from unseen ships.
Crusoe hearts
seeking shore.

– Kay Winter

Waterways 2

26 degrees 31′ 04″ N
051 degrees 14′ 91″ W
17420 feet sea depth
1611 nautical miles

into the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

I am on the port deck,
looking for fresh air.

I can see no horizon,
no line where the starless, moonless night
meets the bottomless black of the water.

I am immobile in the black vastness.

I lose the sense of my own body.

I let one hand go, floating up, light.
I raise a foot,
tentatively letting the wind race underneath it.
I let both feet leave the deck.
My one hand tethers me,
but barely.

I let go.

The wind takes me.

The buffeting stops
after I am away from the ship,
as does my breathing.

The lights of the ship become smaller
and smaller,
then disappear.

I ascend, up,
as the wind takes me.
I am the darkness.
I am the cold.
I am the euphoria of the wind.

Blowing as I will.