GOING SOUTH
George Amabile
for A and the others
We’ve come down,
here where the air is warm
as blood – ten days
in faux time, designed
to heal a year of distress.
But when toothpick and paper
umbrellas in billowy glasses fail
to console, we resort to the sea,
where we, and everyone else, began.
Underwater, stems are snake
supple and the light is nuanced, gradual
as it goes down, and down, toward green
nights we’d never sleep through.
This is where we may recover
that moment, that lovely plunge of the heart,
when we saw everything as a no thing,
where emptiness gave radiance to the world.
"Going South" describes a breakthrough in perception and feeling, an embrace of transcience that results in a world of renewed radiance.
GEORGE AMABILE has published twelve books and has had work in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature.