The Strait

The water's grey at morning before the sun comes through. I made my rounds in silence with nothing left to do.

The strait lays flat and open, it holds the early light. I stood there at the railing and everything was quiet.

My love, it's something, to be this far from home. To stand amongst the rigging like a beggar king upon a throne.

So let the tide carry me, let the wind push through the sail, let some unnamed god above keep away the gales.

I can't describe the color of the water in the haze. No words for sounds of birds that can echo in the spray.

So I write your name and I fold it in the dark. The strait unfolds before me, and you stay where you are.

Yeah, it's something else entirely to stand amongst the crew, to be this close to freedom but be so far from you.

He said the water darkened somewhere toward the west. Green, and then a color that sat wrong in the chest.

The hold was still beneath us. The engine held its tone. And whatever came to find us would not leave us alone.

This is the sound the sea makes right before the storm. This is the breath before the plunge. This is what the psalm was for —

the hundred-and-seventh song, my love, for they that reel and never rest, where He calms the wave to bring them home... but He never calmed the rest.

Oh, no one wrote the verse, my love, for the ship the calm came for. No one wrote that verse. No one wrote that verse.

So light a lamp and leave it — I suppose I'll write it now. The hundred-and-seventh song, my love, had one more verse to go. No one wrote that verse. I suppose I will. I suppose I will.