Finished crossing the night ocean alone
In a double berth cabin on a fogbound ferry
Blowing its mournful horn half the crossing.
I wasn't convinced of any horror in the claim
That everything is just books, that words are
Souls, our possession their transmigration.
Word horror doesn't reach me easily,
And as for possession by books and stories,
Well, that's a stone-cold fact to the last word
But it's got nothing to do with souls. Souls
Are what comes after, when body parts
Company with words to become true body.
I stared out of the pale porthole, a company
Of pilgrims in a single set of worn clothes,
Feeling the soft sway and continual rumble,
The almost uterine environment in the boat,
That giant, plaintive whale machine. Bodies
In bodies in bodies, all afloat on the waves.
Earlier, on the deck, I had walked under
The remarkable cold-water life boats,
Sealed orange, whaleshark shaped, capable
Of holding seventy people alive at once
In those waters that swallowed the Titanic,
Complete with propellers underneath
And a little glass dome on top for lookout,
Like a submarine bulb, a gunner's ball turret,
Or the one-person domes set into tundra
Near the University of Alaska-Fairbanks,
Where a person could stay insulated
While observing the winter Aurora Borealis.
No. What words and books have done
By their possession of us is to wrap us up
In ever more inventive and alienating sleeves
That protect flesh from the world beyond
Words that it fears but quietly longs to rejoin.
The only shiver in a night ocean's the last act
Of imagining swimming straight into the cold
That comes at the end to take words away.
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