Intricate schooners
carved on whalebone
dangle from her wrinkled,
elongated earlobes.
She hasn’t spoken
since the day she learned,
fifty years ago,
she’d lost her only son
to the briny darkness
of Davy Jones’s locker,
her grief frozen
on the verge of breaking,
unforgiving as,
fixed and shattering
with hairline cracks
on the dark
canvas behind her,
the crests of Homer’s oil.
|