Pelagic
Anvil cumuli rear up by mid-afternoon often leaving us in
Silvery rain before the marvelous sun again drops westward
Twelve-hour days long night watches under gleaming stars
Close to the equator the Southern Cross begins to slide into
The densest Milky Way sailing parallel to the Line Islands
The banks of fish below the clouds like the clouds moving
Through blue vivid white-silver-golden water-ether water air
The moon’s rise and phase manifest and clear without scale
Or shadows brings the horizon in close out beyond the rail
Calms the pelagic heave of surging sway roll pitch and yaw
Only an odd black-browed albatross many days from land
Petrels and shearwaters and frigatebirds are the scavengers
No gulls appear over such tropical waters where islands are
Mountaintops steeply sloped lacking tidal-flat gull habitat
Sail each night through the night on the logic of our course
The March-April trade winds steady in our ketch’s full rig
Southeast from Maui to Tahiti with a Tuamotus waypoint
Our speed distance time as if on a bicycle New York to LA
D. E. Steward’s five volumes of Chroma, seventy-two months each, came out in 2018 from Avant-Garde Classics/Amazon, a récit of five volumes, a narrative, a telling, quasi autobiographical, and Torque (Kings Estate Press, 2006) is a poetry collection of 125 pages.