Siren Song Poem by Jordan McLaren

What I would give to know your words,
and how I weep to fear them.
A murky lake of trembling light,
a spangled heaven of diluvian night:
I would swim blind in you,
swim among your distant diamonds,
be scorched by your unknowable heat.
O, could I but see, could I but know!
Darkness snares my tongue,
no promise of a guiding light
by which to undo that Gordian Knot
and my umbral blade is dull.

I stutter at the impossible gap,
the unseen ocean
that forbids the rain of Spring
and chokes my kingdom dry.
Fresh seeds shrivel in the blowing dust.
You cannot be crossed,
roiling, intractable sky;
yet on your winds, is there a word?
An artefact that whispers songs,
that whistles wordlessly their joy
from some fertile, foreign shore.
Come closer, now, that extra step!

What more change comes
on the whispering wind?
A ship of billowing air sails on haze,
skirts the edges of all that is -
and vanishes in sunrise mist,
banished by a torrid light,
a merciless knife of glare.
Did it bear fruit? None now,
an apple that was never there.
Yet still I yearn within my snare.