On Pelicans, and Life in General

"His [Charles] statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy,' instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.'"
-John Fowles, from "The French Lieutenant's Woman"

Drunk with pines and long kisses,
like summer I steer the fast sail of the roses,
bent towards the death of the thin day,
stuck into my solid marine madness.

Pale and lashed to my ravenous water,
I cruise in the sour smell of the naked climate,
still dressed in gray and bitter sounds
and a sad crest of abandoned spray.

Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,
lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once,
becalmed in the throat of the fortunate isles
that are white and sweet as cool hips.

In the moist night my garment of kisses trembles
charged to insanity with electric currents,
heroically divided into dreams
and intoxicating roses practicing on me.

Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves,
your parallel body yields to my arms
like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul,
quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.

Poem: Pablo Neruda "IX" from his collection, "Twenty Love Poems" 
Photograph: Tony Rohrbach