It's a hell of a lot easier
To ride out wanderstorms
Since crew made off
With all the legs
And there's no one left
To scuttle down ratlines
In the dead of calms.

Anchors bite deeper;
Molecular hawsers slacken
As the Gray Loon lies off
These salt-wine planets
Our advancing tides.
Even so, contemplating lint
Leaves us well short of song.

Time now to duffle out again,
Piper paid with trappings and
Accouchements from barddoms
No cosmologist has excavated;
Breeze enough to luff photon sails
And wait, until the last fuel fades
From those nebular eyes.

- David Mitchell