AUTOPILOT
“Vada a bordo, cazzo!”
I was admiring a metaphor but then it sank
not in wine-dark ocean, somewhere between Charybdis and Scylla
but in turquoise sea, shallow, placid
verging on perfect island.
Earlier
the Captain himself had
put us on autopilot, too suave a narcissus
not to entirely confuse skirting sexual danger with
courting maritime disaster
and complete disaster was it too, for all the beauty of vista and shallowness of water, though not without its
comedy of cruise-control leading to full
Groucho Marx-moment of
tumble into lifeboat (what could be
more providential? did he not think, was
He not reminded of
Freud’s philosophy of the ship and
all of those jokes about being in
a boat and not finding the boatman?)
What serendipity should we ignore, dare
we escape without
risking the Olympus (albeit these days that
Poseidon, at least has grown so tiny)?
Always the softness of the parallels
that rise to haunt us
even though
we did not see
doomed forever to fail to see them
no matter how careful
we navigate
carefully, frantically, at
full panic station scan the horizon.
poems 2 die for 