Finally anchored, three snakes
of tightly-bound fibre dived, entwined,
into the sea. Twenty years
after the contortion, akwardly propped together
like damp and brittle kindling:

Anchor locked the jaws
of a submerged rock, and nodded: sun-warmed face above
the biting, grappling undercurrents.

Then a month of this, or several days:
a bubbling, teasing, fumbling
play of minutes watched the ships pass.

Beneath a stark white moon the shoulders of the undergrowth
heaved and shrugged. The waves doubled over,
contradicting themselves, and our ship, soaked in second-hand
sunlight, was colourless with inertia.

For in the lightening flashes, as the storm ran its course
I would see it:
That you were my nigredo,
The black heart of the ocean:
That what we call foresight is hindsight;

looking back upon the present
as if it were the past,
bathed in the fast-approaching morning light
of what slackens and what lasts.