Cape Horn, by Jack D. Harvey
Poetry
Cape Horn
Read the nebulous twilight before you try to take wing against the night, black as a crack or bright with the moon; read the silvery leaves of the willows before you venture midstream in a canoe silent as the grass. All the loose beginnings, the ventures undertaken, understood turn on dangerous flights; benevolence of angels or devils, freshening the poorest enterprise. The die, once cast, turns joyous, nervous, in the air, no longer a cube in fateful repose but a revolving shape, ending its journey and beginning anew. Let go! Hold fast! Under white cliffs by a far-off sea ships are drawn up, the argosy assembled. It’s time to leave now, time to strike out new ways, leave before bell rings, or letters come, before cock crows, or the law is changed; cross the hall, the threshold, shut the door behind you; leave the old land. There before you grim and shining, the sea’s unblinking eye, the voyage south; again and again against the cold, against the antipodes that restless bitter water, rising and falling, that shouting restless voice, warring against the night, borne away on the wind. Beyond Patagonia, beyond the unsinging lines of enormous deliberate seas, a dream, your dream, in the coming dark bright as a bird; again and again rising at world’s end the loom of the cape; again and again, restless, monotonous, the same fateful danger, the same fateful repose.
About the Poet:
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.