The Marriage Voyage of Juan Ramón Jiménez 1916

He doesn’t know whether to trust sound or vision;

reaching for Zenobia across the Atlantic, whether to lend

credence to the sea’s bellyaching or the shadow riven

from the down-slope of a wave. Something distends

inside him, something inorganic balloons the way

worlds morph in size when we close our eyes.

There’s the reality of the steamship, there’s the bouquet

of neural transmitters tied with enigmatic pain—

they co-exist, but they don’t overtop one another.

Stepping onto New York only aggravates the rift;

though he’s greeted by a fiancé, he’ll depend on her

to traverse the space between tongues, in stretches of transit.