Offerings (A Movement In Four Parts)

The night is folly without the moon,     trees blank space against a frontal sky     where lattice work from a bled fish reveals     skeletal markings will not administer     the red jack of hearts to a mistress sea.     Most fickle, the ways of a cockroach     (I don't recommend them) to offerings     of white linen, cold squares atop     a stone diamonded floor.     Palaver shacks drone in ghostly light     communicating some message about eel runs     up the black river, the equivalent brush     of tombstones against dark nightsoil.     Tiny bars open as cubicles.     proverbial flashes of the coming evening,     haciendas to count every blessing.     The road to such places     snarls a dusty pleasure     and will heat thin blood     to boil in the daylight hours.     II     Sweat corrodes the cork's emplacement     about green bottlenecks,     its azure breath tossing back     pools of sparse liquid.     I picture ships placed within such bottles     as bannisters along corrugated highways,     seawater rusting from within the steamfitters's     tonsorial edge.     Haze thickens as sails blur to an artist's brush,     then squiggles in the oilpaint of memory    -     her sides fashioning red wounds as pigment     surfacing from robotical crustaceans     lancing the bottom of a deeper crevice.     III     My steps clank to the gaoler's key     to become, within, handmaidens to thorned plants     acting as fuselage along the building's exterior.     Afar, a white seagull sits as a bespectacled tourist     gracing a buoy like a madras shirt.     Early stars in an afternoon sky     are expansive in Chateau Lafitte finery,     the Rothschilds of the universe playing     a cosmic baccarat.     A girl in a brandy snifter of a dress    -     dark, sensual, runs through tomes of my mind.     It's a hall of mirrors there;     the radiating glass of the sea,     twilight splendour in tall grass,     the hands of thick mahogany chairs     grimacing against perspiring walls.     I sponge water like a good midshipman     off the brow of a leaking vessel.     Nowhere are there signs of more than     partial seepage though smoke in the     back corridors exists from the fiery aguandine.     IV     Green palms unfurl as flags     to the accordian of my eyes,     blinking back the strong belt of sunlight     that precisely floods the room.     Sailors jostle this crowd of memories,     some surly lipped with broad tattoes.     A naked mermaid presses her thighs 'gainst     memory door, then winks as the     stellar crust of oblivion takes me.     ***************************************     In sleep, waterfront toughs are transformed     to storeowners that smile, exchange pleasantries in     Saba.     (French gendarmes embrace on the other side     clustering like starfish on the twin breasts of a beach.)     I devour cups not of riverwater in this cell     but the best pink champagne at the captain's     reception.     With hatfuls of intermittent rest,     blurred outlines recede into mists     thin as General Winter's treasured April snows.     The bony M of a hatpin,     the passkey to better redress of fortune    -     the turnstills, concealed within lavabeds of     bladegrass.     beckon upon the return voyage home.