Sebastian
do not go
and stay on land, do not be a
teacher, do not marry a woman,
do not stay
in your sickbed
in Illyria and perish there.
Do not listen to the gruff voice
of any man; the gentle-gruff voice save
Antonio, of course, with his open
purse and his honest past and his sea-torn
opened by your warming glance—
Do not say Yes to a life that’s so landlocked;
do not drown under waves that aren’t
the blue and salt-slicked width
of sailors’ tongues. Do not die young. Do not
do not do not do not do not do not
end your story with a wedding
my boy, you have so many errant plays
left to helm in your Beauty.
Castaway
in my/Disobedience/my taste for blood/oranges and dark wine/pooling waves/crushing and levitating/my loose robes and tingling flesh/my pith and peel and carpel/dainty wrist/Roman boy/laying out in the sun/soaking/sweet flutes in the ears of/Campeche and calico and conch/the concertina’s lilac/over the gold/the way juice drips/onto salt/and the way/salt drips onto/lips/a rim/of a glass/circling swans/lush and white/landing on the ripples/spheres and arrows/the annular nature of vines and beach plums/red heather and ravishing doldrums/free-floating/with my arms above my head/and my dorsals/silk as ribbons/of drift/unbound/and to think/once I insisted/this was being stranded
That’s how I spend my nights lately,
pulling another rusted hook from my chest,
crying until the horizon knows it
and everyone else does, too;
No matter how much armor plates these limbs,
inside I’m bleeding baby blue.
The spurned seafoam
burns slate into the oncoming tide
and pisciform metamorphoses
cannot save the skinned flesh
that we were so desperate to shed.
Swim to me, he said, and I held
my breath until it was the only thing
I could do; broke the coastline
and my back and shivered baby blue.
Drowned myself, that’s what I should have done.
(For years now it has felt like drowning
to walk on land and not miss the sea.)
He was never happier than when we
went sailing and touched his calloused
hands to the bruises on my hips; I hate this
wretched body, he said. Oh my fucking god,
I said, me, too. As he nestled beside me
in the hull of our Hell
until I gasped out his name
with liquid profanity,
the perfect fluidity of baby blue.
And there goes the ebb; six hundred
letters buried and lost, accruing direst,
signed with Dearest, creating embers for Eternal
cold fires that collect no dust. And here comes
the flow: a pretty coffin with no one
in it, as my hands create a whirlpool
out of all the moonbeams
we’ll never chase into morning;
into meandering, into something strange
and new; and all alone my heart sinks
in that vast chasm, another piece of
beach glass shattered, a shard of baby blue.
In the night, when stars wash up,
streaking, shrinking, shriveling
until they die, to the surface floats
my epitaph;
one last wish to be precious
the way a grain of sand
enfolded
by rings of aragonite and concholin
becomes a part of the same shell,
becomes the sacred mantle of the very self
that creates it; becomes the way you hold me in dreams,
and my dreams become the color of everything I swore true;
kiss and question and sharp quick shudder;
you’ll put your arms around me
until we’re together through and through,
and catch me breathless baby blue.
CELL-EBB-RATION
You cannot see me being Beautiful,
lifting myself up
and pulling at the
tides of air; tiny water-barer,
lithe, glittering, omantic wind-spirit
that no one will catch
gilding the water’s edge, a crest of frost in early December.
You don’t see
there’s no celebration without Freedom– that I missed this
bodiless body, saintless beatitude, blind seer,
diving
in
the lone, silver arrows of the moon. One day I’ll go home, I tell myself
up there, knowing
Home is a flower
that blooms in seven hundred
petals scattered across Time,
and wilts once preserved
in Memory. I suppose this is why
Romeo and Juliet will never move me—
Here I am,
counting breaths
to arias of the sky,
slicking the fluid light of
stars against Nothingness,
soaring, still soaring
while letting tears
slide through
my opened palms, falling,
still falling for the sound of a staff
snapped in half,
each time I don’t return.
Excerpt: An Essay On the Imagination of Water
Raucous stars This dark and gale-sighs
stipple blue fathomlessness; scour eager leaves,
the new crescent’s pale lips. tungsten- curled damp and languid,
velvet lounging ere the sonder’s
pitch
precipice…
(Everything we have heard, we have heard once in our dreams; cicadas’ susurration, mist clung to craning necks of daffodils, lighting-scuff and pallid rabbit feet in hushed grass, the successive thuds of paint-peeled window ledges, neighboured and afar.
Everything is an image
we once ate
whole and unripening;
Everything we have loved, we have loved before.)
Tell me again the first drink of a wish, the thirst for gentleness
all the names you give to the rain long, sweet milk unraveling night
from your thread-bound perch; in clear sips, ingale, neptune, and
swooning iris…
(Everything we have tasted, we have tasted once in our dreams; nectar, cordials, dusk-swept names, ferritin-laced claret; viola strings, lotus-spun silk and fingertips; sonata in a spilling, silver tap; rivulets, costa vera, rococo painting smeared with steam.)
Before the infinity of the sea, there, the bead the story catches up with the dream,
the narration of the myth, of starlight, incan the dream finally
the myth of the dream; descent in that beveled
sip; nourished,
the parched tongue remembers…
(Everything we have touched, we have touched once in our dreams; feathers, bifocals, chemicals and ash; streams, olive branches, Geneva, Venice, and coastal red sands; the palms of your hands out-stretched to mine, the Haliacmonic swim from shore to sun-bracketed shore; Hypno’s yawning embrace; and everything we have loved, we have loved before.)
West Ambrose is a writer and grad student. Their pronouns are he/him and they/them. They are trans, queer, and disabled/chronically ill. They are fascinated by the works of Herman Melville and in their free time love to find weird old teapots and make granola bars that are both vegan and duck friendly. Their twitter is @westofcanon and their website is westofcanon.com where you can find their creative works inspired by antiquity and classic lit.
