I'd promised others and myself

that I would leave it all behind,

this quizzing mirrors

for his face.

Now here's

this hark-back thing

he made at sea

my stepmother kept and I

have coveted for years.

‘Take it,’ she says

too casually.

Making this, he too

was harking back

to how his father knew the sea,

massive rollings under men.

It's his equivalent of poem.

He means it for The Cutty Sark:

sleek black hull, rigging taut

with readiness, bowsprit raring to go,

gulls silent at the turn of tide,

houses, church, and lighthouse,

faces steadfast with goodbyes,

and then that first swell

felt in the muscle lifting the deck.

If I am to go anywhere with this

I must believe in voyages

and mainly in my own:

the Tasmania he set foot in

half-a-century ago, where

he knocked-'em-back

along the Hobart waterfront.

Ships like this (I mean

the ones that hauled

the convicts out) were eight

months roughing it.

He would ride it taking two.

I get whisked there in a day.

It speaks of silence,

infinite poising of the tide;

waves of putty never meant to lift.

Like Keats's little town, streets

are desolate; captain, bosun have

no cheering shouts to raise;

the ship's forever doldrum'd

on a painted sea.

If I dragged its stopper out,

or if by accident I smashed the glass

it would release a soundless sigh

like his that afternoon I watched him die.