Gary LeBel

Vantage

My heart, to what strange cape
Do you turn my voyage?
Pindar, Nemean Ode III (trans. C.M Bowra)

            It’s the time of evening in late summer when sunlight dissolves everything it touches.  In the distance, Savannah dematerializes in the haze, its slow river now a sheet of hammered silver.

            From this vantage it could be Vermeer’s Delft crumbling into twilight, for they’re similar, the Dutch artist’s city and Savannah, both on rivers, both reddened by centuries-old brick, their old commercial buildings as plain and unadorned as the black suits of the merchants whose fortunes raised them, though in Savannah, at the unforgivable expense of slavery and the indentured Irish who built them brick by brick.  

            The descendants of the tall ships that once docked here at Savannah’s waterfront are laden tonight with the goods of Asia as their low, growling diesels plod upriver past the tourists,

            sailing inland to the waiting gloves of stevedores and the hooks of gantry cranes . . .

but there’s something about a port city that always seems to drape over one’s shoulders and bones

a cloak of wanderlust.

     ‘Strange capes’
Lay just around the corner
	For are not the souls of others 
Among the most mysterious and remote
Of destinations?

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About the Author

Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.

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