Loe's "A Passage" begins with a blunt word, "coitus," and ends with an ocean, and the journey between them is the poem. It describes physical love as a voyage in which two bodies join to make one vessel, then give up their separate shapes and spread into something as large as the sea. The title is a pun that fits this. A passage is a stretch of text, a crossing by water, and a moment of transition.
The first stanza is a single long sentence, and its main verb, "breaks," doesn't arrive until the fifth line. Before that the syntax drifts through "and through" and a dash, so the reader is carried along without a clear destination, much as the lovers are. The imagery shifts between sky and sea. "The bare keel of the universe" breaks "the relics of our lucky stars," which suggests that the union overrides fate or superstition. The stanza closes on its central metaphor: "each body connects / to create this corporal ship." "Corporal" simply means "of the body," so the hull is made of flesh.
The second stanza turns from the ship to the beloved's body, which becomes a landscape seen from the deck. "Blue meadows roll from your brow," "solar plains spire from the quiet asylum of your ear," and the hair is "an ancient shore line." The nautical and the pastoral blur together. Even time is given a ship's geometry in "the starboard hour," and a star "peals" in bronze like a ship's bell, so that sight and sound merge. The vocabulary is also quietly religious: "relics," "asylum," "spire," and then "communion." The poem treats the beloved's body as a sacred place, a refuge as well as a shore.
The stanza's turning point is "And I, a sailor, / am shipwrecked in the light." Shipwreck is normally a disaster, but here it is the point of the journey. The speaker is wrecked by being seen, or by seeing, in the morning light that "moves its flawed draw / across thy cool hand." "Draw" may hint at a ship's draught, the depth it sinks into water, or at the pull of attraction. The word "flawed" admits that the light, and the desire, are imperfect. The archaic "thy" in that line sits oddly beside the clinical "coitus." That clash may be deliberate, since the poem keeps setting the physical and the reverent side by side.
The last stanza dissolves the structure the first one built. "Passing into white communion / a pure brightness intuitively human" drops the sailing language for light and breath: "like dreams through the air we breathe." The mention of "art and death" suggests that the union is driven outward by the two forces that most obviously go beyond a single body and a single life. Then the ship is given up. "We abandon the cold geometry's / of our flesh and sex," and the hull, the very thing that held the lovers together, falls away. The final phrase, "ocean size," is blunt and a little ungrammatical, as though ordinary language can't quite hold the scale. The ship was only ever a temporary shape for water.
The poem is in free verse with no regular meter or rhyme scheme. Its music comes from echoes, such as "sky" and "eye" in the opening lines, and the long vowels of "breathe" and "death." The slashes after "brow" and "thought," along with the dashes, work as breath-pauses, like waves between lines. The stanzas run eight, eleven and eight lines, so the longer middle stanza, where the lovers are most closely observed, is framed by the crossing and the dissolution.
Some details suggest the text could use polish. The printed "it's" in "from it's starry destination" and "geometry's" in the last stanza look like errors, though they may be unintended slips in this copy. A few images, like "the bronze peal of the morning star," also strain under their own weight.
Even so, the poem's ambition is clear. It takes the old comparison of love to a sea voyage and pushes it to a conclusion: the ship is a body, the wreck is a surrender, and the real discovery is that the boundary between self and world can dissolve. A love poem that ends with its lovers losing their outlines is attempting something larger than a description of desire.