She unmuscled my body, shook loose skin’s
sail rags and untethered clots of cartilege.
Filleted wood staves and ribs, stacked their bones.
The keel leaned like an out-of-service door,
and the helm hummed round itself to rest on the floor.
She uncaulked the windows and piled them up
so sunlight shot through their deepening wells.
Hammocks were de-threaded, every bunk
shaken free of accumulated dust and sweat
and god-knows-what. Lanterns were de-wicked.
Every pipe and hose in the engine disconnected.
Piled gauges looked like a secondhand store’s
broken watch drawer. Maps, and the idea of maps,
were burned. Each anchor chain link was uncoupled,
and the anchor itself rusted wetly on the floor.
No more travelling. Not in this form. Stripped back
to before the day I slid from the dock and rocked
into the other world of rivers and oceans.
All done, she told the dark, and the latch clicked
as she showed herself out. Whose eyes surveyed
my body, dis-repaired around me? Where had she
bottled up my tears? I hadn’t cried in years, but
scully sinks had been drained, and even the captain’s
liquor cabinet was dry as scrimshaw. Would I ever
be the same? On my feet I was unsteady as the sea,
as if the swells were now inside me. I wore
what I’d come through. Uncompassed, unsure.
I staggered walking towards the plank of the door.
David Allen Sullivan’s books include: Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of translation from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. Most recently, he won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his family. http://davidallensullivan.
–Background & Foreground Photography by Ed Wojtaszek
Asics footwear | Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG ‘University Blue’ — Ietp