A Sailor's Song Poem by John Lars Zwerenz

To and fro,
Broken with grief,
My footsteps go,
Like an arbitrary leaf,
Where the borders of the river flow
In swirls of purple, cold, beneath
The solitary myrtle, the dying oak, the weeping birch.
I sit in a vine-clad yard,
In a swirl of leaves, which makes a wreath
Around my boots, beside the church.
And all that I regard
As true
Which still has life,
(Like the thought of my wife
Inhaling all the blooms of a scarlet hue)
Merely haunt me in my reveries of you,
My sable-haired angel of rapture and rue.
And so Saturn ascends,
As the over-brush bends
Beyond my pea coat, tasting of brine.
I shall drown myself in the ocean's soft wine,
And steal from its Sirens songs of bliss,
Sailing to the East- to the shores of Boston,
To the grasses of Harvard- to eternal happiness,
Where I, Dionysus, married you, the Apollonian!