BOB DAVIS ART

Sailing

The history of the first person is buried beneath us

in layers laid down in sanctifications; bounding green hills

smacked against the sea where the standing stones,

erected on Scottish islands to mark their place

on the permanent earth, claim space

and cry out against the wind. While in Babylon

the ziggurat of Ur was built up stone

on stone and caught the attentions

of the merchants, the ancient Hebrews traveling

new trade routes and declaiming

god’s wrath upon the babel of man; as Noah’s sons

were scattered to the winds in punishment.

And the mounds, Pennsylvania’s burial cairns,

where the presence of the past

is all that the cities of the dead could create.

Here I am handing down my values

and the summer camp dreams of sailing on the lake

that is only big enough for six small sailboats

teaching how to capsize from the motorboat.

I remember what it was like; that breeze in my hair

that first time I wore sunglasses in the glare

of the water, to tack back again.

The wind carries me down the city’s streets

alongside the skyscraper slabs uptilted

passing men in suits in amazement

as I harbor within me the secret I cannot share

the secret of my one true name

that no-one else knows.

And Alexandria melts in the high hot sun, a civilization

on the edge of “the deep forgetfulness of parturition, compounded

of physical pleasures taken without aversion… in a city

to which I did not belong.” Paris buried its kings

under stone cobbles along pathways that culminate

along the roof edge of Chartres, overlooking the fields of ochre grasses

to cross, on the way to the subway back to the île. Vienna

along the streetcar lines, the distant golden dome of the church at Steinhof

stands in the midst of a village, a city, a magic mountain housing 20,000

crazy people surrounded by stone walls piled up.

Maybe I don’t even remember how my name came to be concealed,

how long ago and how many lives have shared it, latent

in whose knowledge? I must have forgotten how it’s said,

what it sounds like when spoken out loud when the air is full of salt

searching in each molecule and the silence makes sense again

and the city absorbs the noise. The wind dies down and the sails luff

in the becalmed so I speak my name, eased into

and fragile, barely audible, absorbed, unheard, but out loud.