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A Dreamed Seascape – The Missing Slate Mark J. Mitchell">
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Literature, PoetrySeptember 17, 2013

A Dreamed Seascape

It starts out cool, like steel

behind your neck, tickling your hairline

even before you hear the sound.

Then the brass bell clangs, your eyes open.

Iron gray skies, no horizon. The sea

is slate, still. What passes for light

 

weighs heavy on you. Pray for a light

wind. Your body wants the swell that bounced the steel

buoy, rang the brass bell. The Sargasso Sea

should be bright, if still. Gray lines

casting sharp shadows on the open

sails. Dolphins should play and sound

 

bright blue, teasing you (you are sound

asleep. This is a dream of ancestral light.

You’re no sailor). But here, the open

ocean is flat, unforgiving as the steel

fixing your keel. You’ll never reach the line

that may mean land, an end of sea.

 

It’s not dark. Just too dull to see

shapes. You remember the bell, its sound

nearby. Some cable, some line

fixes the bellbuoy here. Running lights

reveal nothing. Perched on the bow, grasping steel

cables, cold and sharp, that cut open

 

palms. Nothing. No island, no ice. Just open

water, closed sky. This ugly sea

is endless (even knowing you sleep you steel

yourself for cold disaster). The sound

of the bell fades. Then the sun falls flat, light

comes right at you from the west. A line

 

of white, sharp wavelets. Lines

of wind on water. Your eyes wide, lungs locked open

as if it were solid, as if you could breathe light.

The sun slips low, painting an edge of the sea

orange, briefly, then it’s gone. Soft sounds

of water slapping the dull. a creak of steel

 

cable. No stars. No lines. Even the sea

has vanished. You want to open your eyes. The sound

of an alarm. You wake, grabbing all the light your eyes can steal.

 

~ Mark J. Mitchell

 

Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies “Good Poems”, “American Places”, “Hunger Enough”, “Retail Woes” and “Line Drives”. His chapbook, “Three Visitors” has recently been published by Negative Capability Press. “Artifacts and Relics”, another chapbook, is forthcoming from Folded Word and his novel, “Knight Prisoner”, was recently published by Vagabondage Press.. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster.

Featured artwork: Untitled (gouache on paper), by Babar Moghal.

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Mark J. MitchellPoem of the Weekpoetrysestinas

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