The engines stop. Judder. There was a life that was never yours out on the black sea, where souls were lost and still are, where there was and is not you, stood on deck, looking out on the waters that churn and will churn without you.
There where sweethearts are buried under unimaginable depths, and where depths bury the sweet nothings that you think. Under those blanket black skies in your solitude, in your pomp and your presence, under the underside of iron hulls and twitching motors, in the furrowed tracks that lay the blue sea white, there where you are and are not buried in your own imagination of the place you were and never will be.
Where you can’t be and no one will.
There you are then, before the gods and their nameless names, searching, pleading for a voice to call for you from the rocks that peer aimlessly, purposefully from the deep and erupt and fold and do nothing but erode by the waters and sit and are no more.
Atop those plinths upon which a man would stand and proclaim his love, decry his infamy, be nothing but a man upon a pedestal once upon a time. There you see, or don’t and never will, the sum total of a he who he might be or never was. The pieces of a person become and not become and mean nothing and never can. His arms, legs, his false looks and dumb shadow. His no-imprint on the land and the non-land that cares not for him, but that he cares for more than he can express. Etched as he was, as he won’t be, beneath stars that beam on him from the unknowable history that will and will not exist before and after he ever did.
There, in that slim, sweet spot where he, they, spoke, said, didn’t say, the words that ought to be uttered, that seemed, in this place, to be of such importance, but were consumed by the winds that corral the waters and suck and spray and steal, that pretended to be of the world, the world pretended to be of them.
The view that fell into the eyes which could all at once see everything and all at once see nothing, all at once saw just the single thing; the night spread evenly, unevenly upon the horizon that showed itself and hid itself behind its own shadow and fell, rose, wasn’t moved by the turning of the rock and mud and bones and dirt that sat beneath its feet.
That called and didn’t call to the wolves that were and weren’t there. That made noise and didn’t and presumed to say something to assert itself on its own space, its own time. That meant and doesn’t, and can’t ever mean anything about the love we spoke of, the same love that was spoken of before and will never be spoken of, and finds and doesn’t find its humour and its desire spread amongst the stones and the roots of the orange trees and the no trees and the nowhere trees that could never ever have existed.
Somewhere there and somewhere else and nowhere at all, stuck between the slices that confounded and didn’t mean anything to the sailors that were and weren’t, if ever, stood defiantly to the crashing of time and its nonexistence, was seen and couldn’t be seen the endlessness of a horizon that you will never know, can’t know and doesn’t exist but in a mind strangled by the ineffable, the meaningful and its need to say and have said that which can’t be said. Its placelessness in the sea above and the unseen sea below, which banks, turns, runs, glides, swells and doesn’t, into, unto, upon and within itself and its not-self.
There these words lie or don’t, might not, here, now, never will and won’t be, but for you.