Soliloquies at the Outer Banks

                           CRO
 
                                       —inscription found at the site
                                          of the abandoned colony of Roanoke

1.  Lost Painting by John White

Following their feasts and practices, a daughter
of the Picts keeps watch at arms before
the thatch and windmills of our present future.
The stippled flowers of her skin are bare.
Engravers’ copies of the painting hint
at what the Roman garrisons saw more
than my soft sketches and unpiercing paint.
A father’s gentleness? Adventurer
and expedition artist, I came to lead.
My daughter was among the settlers
at Roanoke. If I idealized
the land, the crops still failed. They found no pearls.
Yet she believed—as if in trees sketched with
the very charcoal left when they’d been razed.

 

2.  Lost Colony

Outside, leaves stick. Ragged newsprint clings.
That which preserves, contains—one changed reminds
me: they have flickering, unbroken wings.
They feel their way like human hands.
Now turquoise, teal, indigo in motion—
sometimes they black out deep in their oblique,
then come back like the first light on the ocean.
But underneath, they’re rain-soaked bark.
Through masks of branches, eyespots blink and glance
away. Mid-sentence, satellites go dark.
You seemed to see. Windows once meant eyes
of wind. The wings’ reflective markings are
like windows in a blighted city: blind,
walled-in eyes of wind. No longer look for me—

 

3.  Croatoan

I waited for a sail to return.
I waited while the cannons rose and gold
was lifted from a dayless depth to shine.
Let this story’s ending go untold.
On different shores, we will become
the other’s myth: the pearl that forms around
the grain that we remember, a word that named
the meeting place—or syllable that sounded
like a bird that carries fire.
                                        The smoke of sand
fills in your tracks (but you gave up the search
too soon). I want to turn back from the sea.
In braids the quartz unravels. Shells will be
chaff shoals, and all will churn and break and wear
to whispering dunes of bitter, blowing sand.

 

4.  Lost Letter

This coast subdues. The currents bank the shards
of what is cast, outcast, endlessly tossed—
and sand collects and passes through like words.

Though you will never hear, I still resist
and write as water fills the hull: a letter
to be found among the amphorae and rust.

We knew our galleon was lost and let
its freight of ponies go. It would be cruel
to make them share in our ship’s fate.

Let me go, my love, and grow forgetful.
Unmoor the anchor; cut the astral thread
that runs between us in the darkness like a tether.

The sand reminds me of you. I do not fear
its pale of wrists and lips, its whispered prayer.

 

5.  Assateague

Letting go, the fallen waves pull back
across the gasping surface of the sand.

They leave what they have filched from rock
and wrecks. The low pines fitted to the wind

hold fast as they at last release their sand.
I lose my way. The present has no maps.

How quickly roads and houses are abandoned.
The wind performs its ongoing eclipse.

New forms appear. A head emerges from
the body of the sea. Soon there will be

a band of them reliving their escapes
and passages, their uncut manes half foam

until they stand like newborn foals, shake free,
and gallop from the present’s gray collapse.

Previously published in North Carolina Literary Review 
and the Circe’s Lament Anthology