The Mariner’s Last Constellation
His vessel, gaunt as winter’s rib, cut through the night’s black spine.
Ten thousand tides had gnawed his charts, ten thousand stars turned cold,
Yet still he chased the phantom glow that once, in youth, he’d sold—
A vow to kiss her twilight hair where ivy choked the quay,
Before the warring heavens claimed his bones for deeper gray.
The town arose in increments—a jawbone of decay:
Crumbled spires like broken lyres where gulls now scripted psalms,
Docks splintered into toothpicks by the sea’s rheumatic palms,
And windows, blind with sediment, wept salt into the streets
Where cobblestones lay upended like a beggar’s last receipts.
No lanterns swung their golden lassos through the ashen air,
Only phosphorescence writhing where her breath had warmed the square.
He anchored in the harbor’s throat, his boots on silted stair,
Each step a dirge for orchards drowned beneath the squid’s domain.
The market square, once loud with thyme, now breathed through kelp’s green chain,
And there—where apricot blossoms clung to rusted iron gates—
A sapling of her laughter twined through coral-clotted slates.
The clocktower’s gutted belly choked on centuries of rain,
Its hands forever fixed at half-past joy, half-past pain.
Beneath the almond tree’s ghost (its roots now seawater veins),
He cupped a compass whose needle spun like a dervish undone—
North had drowned with the lighthouse, south with his only son,
East lay where her garden sank, west where hope’s coin was spent.
Yet in his sack, a vial of dawn from their last argument:
A lock of hair, a dried poppy, maps nibbled by the years,
And a letter never opened, sealed with a tide of tears.
The star arrived as surgeons do—too late, but blazing still—
Polaris, cracked and wheeling through a heaven void of will.
It fell as he knelt in the graveyard of octopus and lime,
Where her name, once carved in jade, now wore the sea’s green rime.
The meteor’s tail stitched his shadow to the roofless church,
A momentary bridegroom bound to planetary hurt.
He thought he heard the clink of looms in weavers’ quarter’s dust,
The clatter of a coffee cup, the faithless peddler’s thrust,
The echo from the well where she’d dropped her mother’s ring
To test the depth of forever—oh, the splashless plummeting!
Now starfish crowned the bucket’s rust, anemones the rope,
And all the stairs she’d swept each morn were slick with kelp’s blind hope.
The star’s corpse cooled beside him, its light sucked down to coals,
As from his coat he drew the flute she’d poised beneath her stole
That solstice when the harbor froze and children skated rings
Around the merchant ships entombed in winter’s crystal wings.
No sound came but the ocean’s cough through silver cavities,
Yet in his ribs, the melody unspooled like wounded bees:
*“What lighthouse dares to outburn time? What anchor hooks the soul?*
*The moon has gouged your seaport’s eyes, the squid its funeral scroll.*
*You kept your vow, old mariner—you died before return,*
*But cities drown as lovers do: salt-lipped, with no urn.”*
He pressed the dead star to his lips. It tasted of her neck
That final dawn when, waving from the dock’s rain-rotted deck,
She’d worn the shawl he’d dyed with shells now petrified to bone.
The tide came in. The star went out. The rocks forgot his moan.
