Song for DS 
– for Donald Ogelive Scott
Ken Meisel 
 
Sprawled out on the bed, your big hands 
like oysters lying folded across your chest 

like you were already inside your coffin 
before your heart surgery even took, 

you pulled me close to you, waving your 
daughter off, and you told me to bring

to you The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, 
for I was to read it to you, before you slept. 

And leaning in to you, reading the lines, 
you closed your eyes, and you let the words 

enter your quiet solace and your torment. 
And when my tongue rowed over the sea’s 

marbled torrent – its waves lush with red 
and green intensities, its landscape of shells

and other, misshapen junk of the deep and swell – 
you let the poet’s words amass in you, 

and you lay your head back in reverie, 
and in a quietude meant only for dreaming. 

And suddenly we were both at the ocean, 
your eyelashes flooded with quartz light, 

and the surrounding firmament of land 
and ocean turned loud and disoriented.

And when you heard the poet speak 
so easily of strolling in trousers on the beach, 

you let your chest rise and wince and fall 
as we trundled past the capsized skiff – 

stormed and paralyzed there in the after- 
squall of waves and froth and aqua-lather 

where the sea gulls, like silly, after-supper 
trolley keeps lifted up and swooped,

and they fell, dizzied, drunk, full of light, 
their short, aggressive beaks tangled 

with small crustaceans, popcorn, algae, 
and with the afternoon’s fading coronets – 

and when we stopped, you and I, to 
ponder how the ocean blurred and softened 

the sand, the shore, the entire strand 
before the sunset and the sea-fall rendered

it agrarian, full of dark roots and pearls, 
and so many loop knots that we lost it 

in the draw and deliverance of the tumbled 
light that was expanding all around us, 

you raised your hand above my voice to say: 
the mermaids, singing each-to-each are here – 

to start their singing in the swirl and in the 
waves, and in the subtle falling shore light – 

and when we spoke that line together, you 
said: “I do not think that they will sing to me.” 

And at the edge of the sea, where haze from 
the horizon’s hot exchange of immanence 

and fervor spread, and the slip and fall of 
sunset hit, mapped the rest of the aerial line, 

one wave – advancing like a molten mermaid 
with its hair on golden fire – rose at us, and 

your daughter and I sat, our hands, wrapped 
around our legs to watch it hit, and spread.

 

About the Author: Ken Meisel is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, Swan Duckling chapbook contest winner, winner of the Liakoura Prize. His books are The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015), Scrap Metal Mantra Poems (Main Street Rag: 2013), Beautiful Rust (Bottom Dog Press: 2009), Just Listening (Pure Heart Press: 2007), Before Exiting (Pure Heart Press: 2006) and Sometimes the Wind (March Street Press: 2002). He has work in Cream City Review, Rattle, Midwest Gothic, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Boxcar Review, Algebra of Owls, Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Broken Plate, Pirene’s Fountain, Firefly.

---