He had taken a deep breath and swam Towards some cloudbank on the horizon That held the illusion of dry land And she had wept, and cursed him And become exhausted with treading water. Seeing me not far away, her hand reached out To keep her up, or have me go down with her, Each choice better than to struggle on alone and exhausted in a bottomless ocean.
Yeats with his golden bird was right There is no country here, no island. At the setting of the sun they will lose sight of you Nor remember you at the dawn. Even Cummings' insensible scuttling claws Lay a great distance and a slow metamorphosis away. This endless blue vista pales poetry And can be no captured beauty. The spoken words Insensate gasps, the unspoken a chain of foam.
I no longer see where she was, no shadow Fixes her place on a featureless surface And even my memory is suspect As I sink without a trace Sans claws, sans Byzantium Sans everything