At Last Barbados

I took the small white oblong pill and by the time

I awoke, flying blue-green over an ocean prairie,

Caribbean sirens sang from island to island;

Lower and lower we dropped until ground speck loomed,

Settled in metal rooftops’ hot colors, and my world had changed from

Dread to calm.

High above Atlantic sounding, on a cliff atop the surge,

Wind patters palm trees’ fronds, a sound like night-time rain; the hemisphere sleeps;

Monkeys scramble and a night bird calls faintly, once, across an answering sky,

In the morning as the eye searches for nothing but what is rolling below,

I swear I see the curvature folding horizon’s coverlet,

And Africa there, a thousand thousand miles across the deep marine and

Along the eastern coast gods march,

Mythic, pitted rocks cleaved from ancient coral reefs;

Nimble boys and old men with grey hair tied in ponytails game the surf,

And ride waves home in crests of long forgetting.

I watch their eyes see nothing but the water;

They care so much that nothing matters anymore.

Still, if I were seeking how to make my bit of clay mean something

In this world when I am gone to whatever home awaits

I’d recall and feel the scene I see; the tide comes in, the tide goes out; it pools

Among the monoliths standing on the shore.

Between the breakers water waits for an instant’s universe,

And eddies, each ephemera a different masterwork.

I will be there in the next millennium; my bones and dust at one with

This pulse of life that more than my short breath

Confirms what was and is; confirms an evermore.