The Mariner’s Unkept Vow
A vessel, gaunt as winter’s ribcage, split the waves—
Its sails, the tattered shrouds of perished hopes,
Clung wet to masts where gulls had ceased to cry.
The captain, hollow-cheeked and salt-scarred, stood
Upon the deck, his eyes two crumbling coals
That sought the horizon’s lie. The sea, a thief,
Had stripped his charts, his compass, every star,
And left him raving to the deafened winds:
“What truth remains when even waves conspire
To drown the footprints of the moon’s retreat?”
Three nights he drifted, till the ocean’s spleen
Spat him upon a shore no map had kissed—
A village, crouched beneath the cliff’s black jaw,
Its cottages like rotted teeth in gums of moss.
No lanterns burned in windows thin as scars;
The streets were choked with silence, thick and old,
Save for the dirge of tides beneath the stones.
A figure emerged—a woman, her hair a storm
Of silver nettles, eyes the gray of unmarked graves.
She spoke no name, but pointed to the east,
Where fog devoured a lighthouse’s skeletal spine.
“You seek the truth that anchors restless souls?”
Her voice, a rasp of rope on wetened wood.
“It dwells where shadows nurse their oldest grudge—
The keeper’s tower, where flame and flesh once wed.
But tread with limbs of willow, mariner,
For promises here rot like sunken ships.”
He followed, driven by the scorpion’s sting
Of memory: a vow, unsigned by time,
Whispered to one whose face now blurred like ink
In water. “Wait,” he’d pledged, “till tides reverse
Their hunger, and I return with proof of shores unseen.”
The tower loomed, its bricks webbed with the sighs
Of centuries. Within, the stagnant air
Clung cold as kelp to skin. On splintered stairs,
He climbed, each step a dirge for drowned men’s bones,
Until the chamber yawned—a gaping throat
Where once the beacon’s heart had pulsed. No flame,
But shelves of dust-caged logs, their pages filled
With script that writhed like eels beneath his gaze:
_All truths are riddles wrapped in deeper night;
The keeper’s light was never meant to guide,
But to betray the moon’s reflected lie._
A chest, iron-banded, crouched beneath the sill,
Its lock a tangle of rust and spider’s art.
Inside, a locket—cold, its hinge a wound—
Revealed a portrait etched by time’s neglect:
_Her_ face, the one who’d waved from fading shores,
Now blurred as shores themselves. Beneath it lay
A letter, sealed with wax the hue of dried despair.
His hands, the trembling leaves of storm-tossed oaks,
Unfolded words that serpentined through time:
“I kept the vigil till my breath grew thin,
But tides, like men, forget their loyalties.
The truth you sought was never in the deep—
It dies with those who wait.”
The cliffs outside
Howled with the wind’s derision. Down he plunged,
Through village streets that coiled like veins grown cold,
Past doors that whispered of the keeper’s curse—
_Who learns the truth must wear its chains of frost—_
Till, in the square, a stone his soul recoiled:
A grave, its epitaph erased by rain,
Save for a name that echoed through his years.
No dates, no roses carved by love’s dull knife,
Just sand that hissed, “She sleeps beneath the thrift
Where none but gulls now kneel to mourn their theft.”
Dawn came, a leper shuffling through the clouds.
The mariner, now crouched where sea met scorn,
Clutched in his palm the locket’s vacant stare.
The waves advanced, their tongues devoid of guile,
To lick the footprints from the shore’s damp slate.
Some say a cry, half-human, half the wail
Of cliffs dissolving, haunts that cove at dusk—
A dirge for vows the ocean claims as hers.
The village, patient as the worm in fruit,
Retains its silence. Truth, that fickle tide,
Leaves only bones where promises once kissed.