At the end of this line there is an opening door
that gives on a blue balcony where a gull will settle
with hooked fingers, then, like an image leaving an idea,
beat in slow scansion across the hammered metal
of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers –
a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily.

In the lilac-flecked distance, the same headlands rust
with flecks of houses blown from the spume of the trough,
and the echo of a gull where a gull’s shadow raced
between sunlit seas. No cry is exultant enough
for my thanks, for my heart that flings open its hinges
and slant my ribs with light. at the end, a shadow
slower than a gull’s over water lengthens, by inches,
and covers the lawn.

There is the same high ardor
of rhetorical sunsets in Sicily as over Martinique,
and the same horizon underlines their bright absence,
the long-loved shining there who, perhaps, do not speak
from unutterable delight, since speech is for mortals,
since at the end of each sentence there is a grave
or the sky’s blue door or, once, the widening portals
of our disenfranchised sublime. The one light we have
still shines on a spire or a conch-shell as it falls
and folds this page over with a whitening wave.