The Wreck of What Was

They say the old man drank to remember,

though what he remembered no one could say for certain.

He kept a mason jar on the windowsill,

cloudy as a cataract, clear as grief.

He told us once, between swallows,

about a chest beneath the Carmine Sea,

gold doubloons and rubies red as sin,

a compass that pointed to something

better than north.

He had sailed toward it.

He had not arrived.

The moonshine burned the way regret does,

slow first, then all at once,

colonising the chest where hope used to sleep.

His hands shook.

He said the map had gone to ruin in the rain,

the ink dissolving like a promise

made to someone younger, someone who believed in X marks the spot.

There is no X, he said.

There is only the looking.

He poured another glass and watched the window

like a man who expects a ship

and knows one will not come.

The treasure rusts now, somewhere beneath fathoms of forgetting,

pearls going grey in the dark,

coins that no one will ever spend.

And he sits with his jar of liquid fire,

burning through the years one slow sip at a time,

a pirate without an ocean,

a map without an end,

the saddest kind of rich,

a man who almost found the thing

and drank to fill the distance.