Of the Rowing Boats

of the rowing boats​

the slender fiberglass

winched

to felted metal racks

trailing vans

bouncing trim teens

on highways

to competitions

about speed

the white-washed

wide-bottomed

ribs with planks

in unhurried drift

to pond’s heart

amorous and buoyant

as an atoll

other rowing boats

dangling from decks

for quick escape

hauntingly drape

as muscle memories

our blistered ancestry

slaves and soldiers

foddered in the seas

whole ​fields left to seed

cannon balls and sugar cane

submerged

in all the rowing boats

we face our wake

pulling water

looking backward

moving forward

to the unseen horizon

unless a passenger

a trusted narrator

faces us

watching

our strokes

and our backs

my life is a rowing boat

without an engine

that exhausts

unearthed plants

exhumed

I am an eager heaving

craft of steady pulls

mistaken for a drift

unless

I am the ocean,

which I am.

this is the most costly

of my forgettings

pleiades in the sextant

a gaze at tomorrow’s clouds

I migrate trace

spirals that swell

and break where

islands in labour

test the surface

molten birthing

delivering us

terrestriality

now nothing is cardinal

when I am the water

the warm saline

dripping from my eyes

the salty balanced solution

not the burn of the brine

aqueous I am

the amniotic

womb

she never left me