The Eighth Bell
Six in twos; the seventh rings alone
Unsheathed; a brazen shaft sped onward
By the rapt, frenetic silence, toward a meniscus film of sea and sky;
Like a streak of sulphur it speeds away
From swelling crests and troughs that jounce the deck:
A hobby horse, whose every rock’s a single stitch from gentle mother’s hand
On canvas innards gorged with frozen souls.
Berth to haven, the seventh flies alone
Un-echoed; no quantum mote of flotsam
Passing back through time rebounds a muted gong of solidarity.
But there - she trails a wake of rippled void!
A shadowgraph apocalypse of night
Whose lashing bow incision cleaves the leeches twain into a naughtical Elmo’s Fire;
A crackling outthrust apsis of redaction.
From out that nameless hue of nothingness crept
The Dog Watch! Coughing, wheezing salts
Of formless spirits, taking body and shape as though the fog were corporeal silken crepe
Through which they passed, and took upon themselves;
A form to braceagainst a frozen wind
Before the Eighth bell draws it off - that fragile veil of life’s brief sheath of linen
That binds the dry, taught souls that scrub the deck.
And toil they do- to scrape the bronze and oak,
For commandant and motherland.
They grope the deck with cracked and bleeding hand of lye to scrape the wretched brine
A deafened sea encrusts on aimless rafts;
Poor sailors pressed into a world naval
First-rate ship of broken backs and gyroscopic clockwork longitudes
That promise lands of spice straight on to morning.
But now the alloy rebounds from horizon.
Turn they do, the groaning souls;
Unsaved, they trail their ‘ravelling garments as they take their leave below the deck.
The light is but a berth in canvas racks:
Merely a solid anchor chain withdrawn
That gives respite until the seventh bell reports again and so on to the dawn
They never see. But what to make of me?
Shall I ring the bell -
An eighth and premature final knell -
And put that final stitch through tortured lip
That for all men a mother slowly stitches from her hip,
So ceasing endless bailing of a foundering ship?