Leaving Dover

A moody sky, some spitting rain.  

I write the letter.

I’d booked passage on a packet

Nimble enough for straits,

Sturdy enough 

For heavy seas,

Crossing oceans, 
The fearful tales about 
Roiling unknown waters 

Taking on less freight

Because age leavens just such cargo.

Dearest, I write, 

The seabirds appear and 

Flit across the bow,

I know that means land ho,

But maybe there is no more terra firma 

For a certain travel, so

I write to you in time’s shortening,  

Fulsome gift

Remember that nothing on this earth

Blooms without love. 

Hollyhocks 

Can’t climb the trellis outside the

Pantry window without love,

And love, like those unfurled velvets, has

Many colors, many longings, 

Many ways of being.

Don’t let anything dissuade your gaze

I am grateful, I write, that there are 

Worlds I didn’t know, 

Worlds that struck my speech

And left me watchful, 

Full of wonder

Perhaps I’m daft, I write,

But I’ll never really be old,

I’ll be shaped and riven 

By decades carving me

Into sky, into earth, my less and my more, 

Like elements and rock, like tides 

Eddying into trickles, tides again

Washing over

Everything that comes to us,

There is oneness, there is reason.

Stars bubble through this damp eve,

Grey cannot trick my mind. 

I know they’re out there, stars 

In a cosmos rich with currents,

Energies and unknown. 

I have gone away, but 

I tell you this, deepest and true, 

Love is never left on moor or down,

In mountains, though I tried;

It’s never left in desert, never left,

It just is, becomes into my 

Bones and sinews and heart,

Tears washing like a mighty river, 

Not from sorrow, 

But from release and understanding

In the quiet comes a fleeting chill:

When we go to stars, nothing matters.

Darling, I write, let mystery and the 
Ordinary hover, life’s tensile stitchery

I breathe my leaving caress

Into the twilight,

All I can do 

From this faraway world.

You find, when you need it

The peace

Of love’s abundant universe.

This I write

And this I promise.

Now the light has gone, grey gone.

Night comes on.

Sailing, I am sailing.