Sailing from Scotland

It has become so difficult to describe you
In lines of soft, faltering words
Like ours,
As we fought to fill a silence
That stretched under rows of Tibetan symbols
And a sea of white.
With your hand you traced a path across its waves
In a ship ill-equipped, conversations tumbling overboard
Until all that was left was the gentle motion
Of fingers swaying across my spine,
The island of my waist breaking under the weight
Of the heaving starboard,
Of words suppressed into a single motion,
Lost on their way to me across the highlands,
The pulsing Atlantic, the darkened sand, the worn concrete of manhattan
Until finally they wandered into the nothingness
That lay between you and me
And became this sweeping, two-fingered I love you
Up, down, up again, then crashing down,
Thrashing waves of ebony,
A barren ship in a cotton sea.