Elegy with Drowned Sailor and Endless Horizon

Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life?

— Derek Walcott

I often imagine a borderless world, oceans decanted into a pebble, the sunset unbending in the moonlight, no talk of walls to amend my knowledge

of what a country could be, but isn’t, no wry snarl of the powerful whiplashed through the centuries, brined into the lungs, just line after line of wave lapping prow,

a song of starfish and anchored skiff, and a hammock rocking gentle reveries forward through the transcendent cobalt blue we all dream in, when we dream of water.

Regardless of national origin, no matter the legacy of musket among the palm trees, no matter how many claim the earth is flat, no matter how blood

chums the ripples our ancestors swim through, we will find ourselves a window, a frame, and we will use the small axe of the self to fashion a canoe out of history.