DEEP SEA POEM

The sea lies on her back barking against the stars.
In her depths that know no mirrors
passes a torchlight procession of fish,
eyeless mobs of loners and amoebas.

In this stodgy darkness
the ugly aerial root of logic
could never find a bottom
because echoes devoured it before
it could ennerve the waters.

The sun is a strange vegetable there.
Dreams know beginning nor end.

On the clouded trapezes of the rocks
only weed gyms. Here lamentations,
undelivered letters, suicides
and orphaned eyes converge in a ancient
rite of wreckage music.

And if you listen closely
you can hear time itself sobbing slowly;
at the bottom that no one ever perceived,
pictures the devil took of our dreams.

*

DEAD-END WATER

The quay dawns. Ships snore on the waves.
You carry me away in the old, creaking sloop of your mouth.
Into the yoke of another time.

Into the treacherous velvet of snow.
Into the breath of dogs finding each other again
in rotten leaf groves or reefs.
Don’t break me, carry me far.

Become my
dead-end water. I want to be the echo
of articulations in your boots, under
breaking ice. I want to sink the boat of

my youth in the faithless wakes of your eyes
that constantly refuse to provide mewith a familiar palate.

Martijn Benders – Both from ‘Karavanserai’, 2008, soon available
in my collection ‘The Book of the Poems’.