Windjammer, St. Lucia, colored pencil (January, 1999)
Listening to George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’
I’m on the balcony notched into the rain-forest hill
Where the foil-blue sea seems to slide through railing posts,
The steep angle tipping me toward the Caribbean,
Blue like the blue in my son’s eyes that he got from grandfathers—
The bay-caught blue smoothing west to the horizon,
Which is no end at all, just the curvy Earth meeting sky
To join dark and light blue, a line that convinced early lookers of far danger,
The end beyond which the old maps warned “There be Monsters,”
For the edge appears to be there, even if always advancing,
So the best sailor never falls off but will forever wrap navigational yarn
Around the blue-green ball, this sphere holding its own in bottom-free space,
The forces and counter-forces swinging the unhinged globe
About the hot-spot Sun in a delicate yet titanic dance among moons,
Broken asteroids, and fiery projectiles—the Sun the same and never the same,
Not stopped in time like my recollection of Sunray Bakery,
Whose short, fat, crusty loaves my mother bought each week and brought home
In a white paper bag printed with the name of the shop in a red sunburst logo,
Humble homage to our star, not so different from desert Sun worshippers,
The Sun that does not rise or sink but flames in a self-published burn,
Flares leaping from the atomic pot, crackling enough to scramble radio waves,
Sun no more gold than the sky is blue.
—Paul Marion (1999)