On the Seawall at Lane’s Cove

 

            In Memoriam, David Ferry

 

 

Talking about what will kill us

or can,

idly,

as old people do,

looking north at the horizon

I think of John Keats.

 

Died young.

 

“Here lies one,” he wrote,

“whose name was writ in water.”

 

He was thinking of being dead,

but what did he imagine?

 

I picture his name

running across the page like a cursive tear

and evanescing into

nothing to link it

back to what meant it.

 

Or a trail of ink thinning

in water,

spinning out and down to darkness

like the blood of a wounded swimmer,

spreading into scent for predators

who leave nothing.

 

(He who drowned

in his own blood.)

 

What is in that “in”? or in

sitting here, thinking?

 

I like best to imagine

that he was thinking of a language,

flowing like ocean,

connecting continents.

 

Now you see it,

don’t you?

 

You see it as I write it—

cross-hatched by scribbles

flattening into glassy scars

that boats left on their way

to the horizon.