Text
For decades, I was part of a machine I loved.
It mothered me, raised me up from what sad self
I was, bookish, theoretical, unbodied. By
dog watch. By heaving line, by windlass
and engine rounds, by Roger that
I learned a life. She was conservative,
this mother. Her corporate
particulars: guest not passenger, stateroom
not cabin. No tattoos back then. No
piercings other than the two small lobe-holes girls
were allowed. She pretended to not notice
my nose ring, my raised eyebrow. I loved
the stories she told at night, in the darkened
pilot house, as I watched with captain or mate
for real dangers (we once ran aground) and the predicted
navigational winks telling us where we were (where?)
and what to avoid. What to avoid? Whistling, bananas,
women, queers. My first true love and I chuckled
then kissed in the gear locker, breast
to breast. Look. I slept inside her (that mother).
I slept inside her with my siblings: Frank and Nori
and Tom and Michael. Or, more exactly, we shared
cabins, bunk by bunk, watch by watch. We slept
together in the spell of what it was
to choose to sleep there. Innocent then of
(marketing, marketing, carbon and trodding). And
the older, cooler cousins (officers, engineers,
naturalists who’d done this for decades)—I studied them.
Sometimes I, too, pulled up the long brass zipper
of my boiler suit and got ready to grind metal or paint
a rail with toxic stuff that would endure a while in the tough
air. Sometimes I, too, drove the Zodiac, stood
with hand on tiller, left knee braced against the port
pontoon. Years later, youth purged, they welcomed
I – ahh, fuck it. Listen. We were fooling ourselves,
me. Let me lecture on bears or whales or lichen. Sometimes
even then. Even then, in those days, we knew
there was rot and wrong in this. Or we should have.
Uncollected, first published in Poetry Northwest