Old Ports
“I am somewhere between a bird and a chained dog — the right place.”
A perpetual moment sinks into my draw, it stirs
about my head in a lukewarm whiff. It waits
in a blurred and naked ken of birth-marked film, spilled
canopy of gloom diluted to a blue with life.
A living lens affixed from feet to frontier. Brewing ago
and asking to foretell my paltry future. It lies
as a long-closed mirror to a louring crystal ball;
bound only by the landing of the thrown.
The lope of tides here is a sincere, instinctive count. A natal echo
holds address, as waters charm and yearn, and attains
what is its by right, kneading in half and halves
yet smaller still. Here, I recall — behind me lies its outcome.
My wet nurse, my despot, my agency, my natural hospice. A stiff
turn-style; here, court is king. A disband wood
of behemoth vessels javelined from harbour and made totem,
marooned between the knee-high man-made nests.
The dulcet brink is sopped up by the soaring copies,
rushing spirits do not sway their crowns, they keep and stretch
and prop the damp, swelled awning. Before the coming
storm, the crows descend aground.
I am somewhere between a bird and a chained dog — the right place.
To stand amid the soaking crag canteens, brown brick
aging faster than the skin inside, like cardboard in a puddle. As the warm
rain’s journey comes to an end at my feet.
Old men wipe water off their wooden anchors, wringing their cloths dry,
across from gated fields where inveterate stones stand
as erected perpetuities to buried moments. Even
silence needs a place to rest.
Yves Roubanov is a poet and fiction writer from Russia. He spent many of his formative years growing up in Toronto between visits home to the Black Sea.
He now lives in Montreal where he studies woodworking, can be regularly found fixing up bikes, and recently finished his first book of poetry.
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