Departure
BY MICHAEL BAZZETT
The green island of your life will recede.
It will hover above its reflection
as the boat cuts its wake and a white
lip curls steadily from the sea—
the harder you grip the rail and stare
the more there will be no apparent change
but the shore will nonetheless flatten
into a dark line then only the idea
of a dark line so that when you look
away and then back you will not
be certain where it is & how you stand
in relation to what is no longer there.
o
Changes will alter the knit of your body.
Not these hands gripping the boat rail
now made of fine-grained vapor
but the body you left on the kitchen floor
where its weave of ligature
grows slack as it sheds its
memory of habitual movements
and coagulations and chemical shifts
occur as if you were a warm
loaf left cooling on a countertop—