Archipelago

Archipelago

Archipelago

For years you hugged the coast, steering close
to the sense of loss, sounding out the landfalls, the echoes
of inlets, beaches lapped by memory’s tides,
the vanished coves and mangroves, measuring
the geography of absence, erasing the cluttered skyline,
restoring the lost margins to the coast, to what
it might have been, as if mapping the meridian
of yourself, the routes that led you from the coast of forgetting
to this coast of remembering.
 
* * *
 
You have been coasting through the archipelago,
counting the islands over and over, feeling
you miss one each time or count the same island twice.
Dot joining emerald dot, you motor from link to link
along memory’s reefs, rounding them up, as though you could
someday round the cape of yourself, pin
the archipelago from coast to coast in a name
that will echo like home.
 
* * *
 
From coast to coast the lines of your life stretch
as between two poles, the one that repels you
and one that draws you, what has been and what is still possible,
two hands that gather, weave, braid, the strands
pulled taut, stretched to make a cat’s cradle
where lines of the past cross lines of the present, a ghostly
music in the wind, in the spectral gusts
that haunt the waters between two coasts.
 
* * *
 
Like rune stones, like beads of a rosary, you recite
the islands’ names, like shells you collect, conches
you hold to the present tense, to fetch the shapes
of sounds, the murmur of waves tracing the shapes
of vanished coasts, kampongs and palm-lined beaches
where morning and evening footprints tell a different story
that the tides commit to their heart over and over.
 
* * *
 
From coast to coast the song lives
on the waveband of memory, riding past the stations
of your life, the faces and places translated
in an afterlife, like a song becoming something else
in a jazz set, taken as far as the chords can go, then
coming home, the melody arriving, the way
an old hit finds new life in a different voice.
 
* * *
 
Coast to coast the top-forty hits chart
the story of your life, one end to the other,
the island traversed in an hour’s songs on the radio,
climbing in and out of love, bodies given
in music to what lives between song and song,
till what drives the music becomes what the music
drives, and you forget, you remember, you lose
and love, all stations travelled between coast and coast.
 
* * *
 
Coast-commuting you forget which coast
you are looking at and which one you are on,
the distance between stretching like a lens
that refracts what there was into what will be,
the translation turning the present tense
into the past, your life into something lived,
and you are a long reverberation in between.
 
* * *
 
Coast of the living and coast of the dead,
you never know which is which, the ocean
dreams between mixing up the voices, so that
you forget the passage, the crossing over,
where you started out from, which coast
wavered on the horizon of your leaving
and which rose to meet you in the dawn
that looked like ending.
 
* * *
 
Between coast and coast a life of crossings,
writing, erasing, rewriting, palimpsest
of passages that cancels or renews, echoes trapped
between walls, and you never know the source
of the voice; or two opposing mirrors, as
in the barber-shop, when your face diminishes,
multiplied, and you lose sight of the boy
on the barber-chair, and forget the man he has become.
 
* * *
 
On the coast where you start to say the foreign
names, the old ones start up in your head
and recite their chant, the coastal road
sewing the names together in one long curve
and the islands rise from the lightening waters and assemble
into the archipelago of clouds tracing the line
of the coast, past the beach where you stand and wave
hello or goodbye