The Boat with a Boy's Heart
       

He was a small boy—lighter than a shrimp boat,
slighter than the lip of a lungfish.

He wore an oval skirt, not a kilt, but the kind
his mother wore to mass on Sundays

with clam hats and whale shoes and blue-green skivvies.
He was lost without his carousel, mermaid, gazelle, amoeba

all huddled and muddled as if thrown miles
in a hurricane, a loose wind the color of oysters Rockefeller—

he and his glowing ribcage, his placable heart.

It wasn't a heart at all but a small shipwreck,
a variation of the Hesperus, the Esmeralda,

the six-lane highway they call the Palmetto.
We're off, said the carousel. Grab the rope and hope for wind.

He swept the last strands of the wind to the wind and the wind
said to him: Avoid symmetry, be brave as a jib.

The heart of the boy, not wood like a mote,
was a heart like a boat, and he frequently

shucked around the boardwalk with a hockey stick and a beer,
creating his own world of supreme beings.

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Copyright © 2012 Neil de la Flor & Maureen Seaton All rights reserved
from Sinead O'Connor and her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds
Firewheel Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission