Dare I moor to ships untangling from sea,
to bleary avatars who manifest
as my father and Odysseus cease to be?

I festoon stories with remnants of me,
and garland clouds with memories abreast,
but dare I moor to ships untangling from sea?

His ship emerges like Aphrodite;
her breath eddies then settles on my chest.
As my father and Odysseus cease to be,

waves whisper of his days in the Navy.
I puppet him through his harbor of rest.
Dare I moor to ships untangling from sea,

cast him an anchor from my balcony?
Gulls ferry his ship to pinkening West,
as my father and Odysseus cease to be.

And will the waves lap, so that even he
fades to a Golden Book I once loved best?
Dare I moor to ships untangling from sea
as my father with Odysseus ceases to be?

Caroline N. Simpson teaches English at Edmonds Community College, WA. She studied playwriting at Emerson College and poetry at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature, Italy. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, published in the U.S. and abroad, and won Honorable Mention in Hot Street’s 2013 Emerging Writers Contest.