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| (framed on the restaurant wall)
Under full sail framed on the wall of the restaurant, what would her captain have thought? unfurled, plowing through a green wave, an arrow creating currents and destroying them as well from my table I look closer not a man or a boy on her painted deck is she a ghost? or is the painter�s vision a memory of wood and sail only no one to drive her and to hoist and pull and lean? this is a portrait of his love, his jealous hand excluding all others, recording only cloud and wave and mast to be hung on the restaurant wall, barely noticed by busy tourists, glimpsed occasionally by the amateur nautical and fallen in love with by the once in a while poet. and in my mind its sails fill, breaking the prison of it�s frame, heading for the Azores maybe, or the Canaries, or the Americas, pursued or pursuing, captained by the most adventurous of blood and moved by wind and thought alone. would I be allowed to stand on her stern, grayed by salt water, one eye fixed on a fixed star, one hand gripping manila rope, the other, torn parchment? my order is up, my eyes sliding from the frame to my meal leaving the clipper Westward Ho forever clipping frozen in that dream of the fabled west. |