Self-Portrait

Comments

1. Santiago says

   July 11, 2008 at 2:43 pm

   I believe in you, Matthew.

   Reply
2. Anonymous says

   July 11, 2008 at 3:08 pm

   how’d you take the picture?

   Reply
3. job says

   July 12, 2008 at 7:38 pm

   Matthew,

   Without comment…

   The Soft Verges

   We struck sail and sank on the soft verges
   Two days later, sighting Easter Island,
   Shipping aboard the aptly named Abel,
   A coal tramp-steamer, her sad fortunes wedged
   Between the Bounty and the Endurance:
   In the mutiny of slayer typhoons
   And the crushing sport of first monsoons,
   She came ashore twisting, keel off balance,
   Her steel hulking in breakers, yanked and dredged
   From shallows of sunrise-crimson coral.
   For months before, a calm sea. Now it surges
   With storm to resurrect Abel’s husk. She lands
   Stranded, shipwrecked, abandoned to herself
   On the shores of salvaged experience
   Where I came to live first, coughed up here just
   Like Jonah, vomit of divine disgust,
   Sole survivor of Abel’s able crew.
   Now poking a broken mop stick among
   Soggy hardtack, my distinctions run aground,
   I pick through Abel’s guts for something to do.
   Counting off months by moons, stocking my shelf
   With seashells for cups and plates, getting along
   With the constant ocean of constant sound
   – The sea and soul both survive land’s innocence.
   The storm and tide usher in good medicines
   Bobbing bottles of booze – whisky elixirs –
   Crates of port from Abel’s hold, regurgitated,
   Ocean’s cluttered patina of back fill,
   Here bruised on the soft verges, stagnated
   Without cure, here where a maiden monster’s tail
   Curls baroque around a map’s compass rose,
   A portent no less strange than plangent crows
   I’ve seen blown off course by a waterspout
   Circling the surf, singing strangely far out
   From land. The star cross of constellations
   Rises, star to alien star, from water
   Where now stare the vacant eyes of drowned shipmates
   Who swell out, full of underachievement.
   Last night’s storm flushed them into the lagoon
   Still in their whites like corporeal heaven.
   They float around, hung fired at its pearled gates
   Awaiting charts for permanent address.
   My own paradise embraces elation:
   The sun sags behind palm’s shade. The winds drowse.
   Sea-grass for my bed and palm tree for house,
   Married to neither, I am love’s maroon.
   Back home my absence is significant
   As stains on an old, flea-blown mattress.
   Here are the soft verges and here am I
   Where latitude and longitude rely
   Less on sextant, more on imagination.
   I take a poke at some drifting flotsam –
   Articles of survival and destruction:
   Soggy rat poison, candles, rum and lye.
   I watch waves bend themselves over spindrift –
   A source of wonder and irritation
   Like diving bell vomit, oyster or clam.
   I take stock of things– including crude beauty
   That oil makes on water, and I sift
   Through images of impulse and combustion.
   The Abel’s hemorrhage slicks the beach with oil
   Springing rainbows from wings of dead seagulls.
   She lists, sand-stuck, matron without her pod
   Chafed to rust and languor, washing up
   After taking all hands but mine, her belly
   Is tomb to the unforgiving bottom.
   I’m neither on the inside or outside
   Living the balance of the hatchway’s lip.
   This island’s address might well be heaven’s spoil
   And I could claim it my own or Abel’s,
   We two vessels with no vestige of valor
   Left here on the verge of courage and fear.

   Reply
4. Chanda says

   October 8, 2014 at 2:04 pm

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   Reply
5. Hosea says

   October 8, 2014 at 5:07 pm

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   Reply
   • Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

     October 9, 2014 at 3:06 am

     I’ll definitely comeback.

     Ah, Hosea. Faithful to the last.

     Reply