Farewell to Florida

Painting by Lissa Friedman


Farewell to Florida


I
Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,
The snake has left its skin upon the floor.
Key West sank downward under massive clouds
And silvers and greens spread over the sea.
The moon is at the mast-head
and the past is dead.
Her mind will never speak to me again.
I am free. High above the mast the moon
Rides clear of her mind
and the waves make a refrain
Of this: that the snake has shed its skin
upon the floor. Go on through the darkness.
The waves fly back


II
Her mind had bound me round.
The palms were hot
As if I lived in ashen ground, as if
The leaves in which the wind
kept up its sound
From my North of cold whistled
in a sepulchral South,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine,
in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
For music, for whisperings from the reefs.
How content I shall be in the North
to which I sail
And to feel sure and to forget
the bleaching sand ...


III
I hated the weathery yawl
from which the pools
Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness
Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut,
the rust and bones,
The trees likes bones and the leaves
half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck
in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land
is forever gone
And that she will not follow in any word
Or look, nor ever again in thought, except
That I loved her once ... Farewell.
Go on, high ship.


IV
My North is leafless and lies
in a wintry slime
Both of men and clouds,
a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides,
then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered,
turbulent with foam.
To be free again,
to return to the violent mind
That is their mind, these men,
and that will bind
Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me
To the cold, go on, high ship, go on,
plunge on.


Wallace Stevens

Posted over on Poetry Foundation