Monthly Archives: November 2014

Love lost you across a bloody ocean — a sestina

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25 
(...that I am simply tired of looking at.  And Paul had to go and mention sestinas.  
I'm not happy with it.  It isn't done. I have been working on it for at least a 
year and a half.      That may seem like a long time, but certain poems ask 
for more time....Time, I guess, to abandon it here...for now.)

Love lost you across a bloody ocean.
I am hidden from you, my love,		
a murrelet gone from the nest, lost		
to all the world, dreamed in bloody	
battles that boil and rage across		
imagined fields of poppies.  You		

color those blooms with absence.  You		
drain those lands, fill them like oceans	
and dance in my dark thoughts across   		
the miles that cleave us from our love-- 	
that have torn us into bloody			
halves for the peace of those lost		

in propriety—all those lost, 			
willful souls that we still love, you 		
and I, despite their blind, bloody		
ignorance, their minds an ocean		
of not thinking of all that love 		
can do, how it can reach across 		

any gap, bridge and arc across		
any space, rebuild any lost			
tie if we let it.  But our love			
can not bear the deceit that you		
and I must swim in.  We’re ocean			
creatures in air dragging bloody 		

limbs.  Our hearts limp through bloody	
shoals of dry ghosts.  We crawl across		
deserts’ dust, longing for ocean		
depths but the two of us are lost		
even to memory while you			
fight with honor every day.  Love?		

What do the free know about love 	
when they do not see your bloody		
eyes in the dark, can not hear you		
calling to another across			
all these nights alone?  I am lost		
in this empty, arid ocean.			

Now you, whom I’ve ever lost despite love, 
are farther than gone across a distance
greater than all these bloody oceans.