Adrienne Rich — Eurycleas Tale

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting for a father dawdling among the isles and the seascape hollowed out by that boy's edged gaze to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld and that speck, that curious man, has kept from home till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood and tears of an old woman must run down to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what can they do together, father and son? the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea but all the time and everywhere lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball light: light on the ship racked up in port the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bridge