Celestial
-for Maria
Celeste
“These stars, long burnt out, in whose light we make our truce.”
—Lise
Goett
There was a ship,
there always is
in tales like these—some ventured vessel adrift
on whatever wave will carry it. A couple,
two students in an all-but-seedy boardwalk bar,
are sharing their own tales over ale. He, a poet,
knows too well these seafaring conventions—how
a glimpsed flotsam flipper suggests serpents, knows the stones
the sirens sing him towards—but still he listens, follows
the semaphore of lids over eyes ice-glazed and glittered
as a midnight sea. She pauses to drink a moment's silence
through her cigarette—smoke lingering between breath and word—
before heralding the morning's news. She leans closer,
takes his hand, tells him, “This needs to be
_____
a poem.” She read once that distance recalls
a face “faded, like a favorite dress washed
too often,” learned from countless epics the way
lovers idle themselves while the other is missing.
On the news a man says the golfer's jet
flew too high over six states of maize,
too close to the sun that couldn't melt
the frozen dew of its wings, the crystal condensation
over glass—says, at that height, the air is too thin
to breathe. In the next room, she wishes
she could be the calm Penelope, weaving towards return.
Instead, she speed-dials his cell phone, persistently thumbing
one ear shut against the newsman's words.
“Only the autopilot is calling,” he says, “constantly
begging response.” At times she thinks she hears him
answer dimly, before the signal fades
_____
lost. Through all of this, a chaos
of shimmer and wave swept past
even the horizon's unfathomed
glimpse into everything—even here
we plead order from above.
In 1872, on the bridge of the Mary Celeste
the helmsman gazes through the last uncast sky
he'll know to find Orion's belt. His place,
he might tell us in an equally windless voice is found
there, in that light-pricked intrusion of order—the Hunter
damned to sail the sky for love
of Artemis, mother of moon and monster, pursued
by a scorpion of stars. Every seaman knows
this tale, but as our navigator narrates his own
rending, he thinks of his wife waiting
at every port he's promised to ply the seas
back to, watches the first black breath of cloud
cover Castor, Pollux—Gemini's twins—until even
the sky is silence. “The heavens
hold a star for each of us,” he wants
to tell her as distant lightning warns
the storm, “and mine will shine for you if even here
_____
I die.” As this final morse-murmur flitters
into frequency, the radio operator begins to breathe
the gas-tainted air with something like acceptance.
After the bomb, he thought the sea would be
safest, always lingering between destinations.
He couldn't have known the poisoned breath
his ship, the Ourang Medan, had waited miles to exhale.
This is the revelation of Shakespeare's dead,
he thinks, the desperate awareness of knowing
too much. He barely feels his teeth clench, his body
surging to stiffness. In a phosphene gleam
he sees his wife, the day she threw her ring
into the grass after their last fight. Alone
he searched for it, lost in waves of bermuda. Now
he manages his hand to his pocket, fingers
past compass and coin, and finds it there.
Having breathed these dreams too deeply, he thinks
he sees her standing past the fumes. He reaches
the ring towards her as if tempting the softened light
to shine, whispering to nothing, “It's found,
_____
it's found.” They kiss the way waves might, standing
outside the bar. With his free hand the poet moors
a loose strand of hair behind her ear, knowing how intimately
the past is lost in these first breaths of affection. They search
through the glow of streetlights to find the Hunter's belt,
the middle star. He tells her how the light falls
fifteen hundred years before it finds us here, how
no one can say its source still burns. That night
he lies awake beside her, watches the sheets rise and fall
calmly with her windless breath. He remembers
the Mary Celeste, almost her namesake—promises her silently
she'll never have to search again. He closes his eyes,
his arm still holding her as they sail together towards morning.