By MARCUS MYERS
If our bodies are vessels, hers sailed away.
I am sunken eleven months deep, away from her
hazel eyes like aulos pipers for my oarsmen,
away from her
sun-warmed sides and bronze-sheathed prow.
Before she sank me, we rowed a while together
and she seemed to like the wake we made.
She said I was always too heavy, though.
She said, Where’s the levity?
She said when we talked, we dove too deep,
too fast,
into the abyssal zone
where things get weird.
The bottom of what I feel for her: a fleet ship
weighted centuries-deep
with the wine- and honey-laden amphora
we once carried together.
The weight of what I feel for her, the cedar-
pitch timber of it, will never surface
to lift the bright air
pushing against our sails again.
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, where he teaches and serves as co-founding editor of Bear Review. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Cortland Review, The Florida Review, Hunger Mountain, Laurel Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, RHINO, Salt Hill, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.
