Plasma

drift

      Hagar and Ishmael, cast   

         on the wide desert,   

drift, and a placeless voice   

draws them to water   

                              St. Elmo,   

eyes scorched, preaches them   

to the lightning touching down   

close, blackening the deck   

around him, disclosing tars   

          transfixed in the rigging—   

with a pallid fire, writes Melville,   

            lamplit, landlocked   

            at Arrowhead Farm   

            and in the wilderness the boy   

became an archer

                        I read   

again, then wandered the house,   

turning off the fluorescents   

and the news on the flat screen—   

raw sun on the saltwater and ice,   

a tank tread sprawled in the sand   

like a snarled length of spine—   

            and went out to listen   

to the cloud fields foredarkened   

with charge and ask again   

         into that synapse   

by what light will I see   

as even now I am seen?