The Fortunate Isles

A few million silvery fish children swim
Across his belly. He gasps. I'll have to wash
It off my sheets. We hook our limbs
And rock, and sigh. If he got me pregnant then
Perhaps I'd kill it. I haven't ever had to make
A real decision - on, oh God, so many things.
Are all those choices still curled away
Like the seeds in my belly, most never to be born?

My life is like an old map of the Ocean Sphere
With curly maelstroms of foam,
And gothic script to label the unknown:
Dragons, five-headed men, Leviathan who could snap
Your ship with one shrug for his toothpick,
And even Earthly Paradise toward the antipodes
(Though perhaps just the mapmaker's
Merry whiskey dream...)
I wait in the sphere of his arms.
We smell of morning bed: sleep and sweat and crotch.

Or perhaps my life is like waiting to catch a wave:
They pull and roll on past and leave you behind,
Until finally the fortunate foam grabs you,
You're lost in the rush of its flying fizz and then,
Crash - it dumps you home.
Seneca said,
"There will come an age in some distant future
When the Ocean shall loosen its shackles
And the earth shall lie wide open.
And Typhis shall discover a new world.
And no longer shall there be an end to the earth."

One more day swells inside us and around us.