from “Homage to Edgar Allen Poe”

Tonight, watching the stars at the bow,

my head draped over with giddy blood,

body and boat drifting that other sky,

I think of you suspended in the Chesapeake

channel where wind frets and the seahawk

blinks over cordgrass.

You believed

in the black eyes of love that wait

beyond the deep rotting of the sea.  I

have ridden out in this ancestral scow

to dream with you. Look for me

staring off over the tide’s dark

as we pass through each humping swell.

This is the ghost’s road to Baltimore.

The engines churn, the raked hull broods.