F. D. Reeve: Coasting

American Poetry Review, The, Jul 1995 by Reeve, F D

Adrift in uncollected time

like sailboats invisible in fog,

the extraordinary selves we wanted to become

pretend to keep their daily logs

as the mind courses from sleep to sleep

down an imaginary map

and night after night we plant our homemade flag

on insubstantial shores.

Because all things balance--as on a wheel-

and we cannot; see nine-tenths of what is real,

our claims of self-reliance are pieced together

by unpanned gold. The whole system is a game:

the planets are the shells; our earth, the pea.

May there be no moaning of the bar.

Like ships at sunset in a reverie,

we are shadows of what we are.

If soul is form and gives a body life,

reality is a gathering of ghosts.

Love, like a magnet, draws each lover out;

the light that speeds around in empty space

extracts the future from the past.

We circle the stars to find our secret place,

and the dying mackerel believe the gong

off Pemaquid tolls for them

on the cold, gray-green sea.

F.D. Reeve's latest book of poems, Concrete Music, was published by Pyncheon House in 1992. He was awarded the New England Poetry Club Golden Rose in 1993. A Few Rounds of Old Maid and Other Stories will be published by Azul Editions in April 1996.