The glazed surface of his palm
cups midnight's swell—where
upon a scrap of paper the word
drowned floats among the scratched
blueprint's crosshatches, like white waves
blossoming over the sea's body. Less a bronze
haze than a wave's central movement
and less his greater faults over a series
of milky leakages; the storm as a confession

remembered, a strange truth in the captain eyes
as he eyed a stale baguette
slathered with garlic butter and now listens
to the phlegm of the near shore. His long
death, a language enough to be food.

The South Atlantic in spring
is groomed in sea lice. Driftwood
damns the channel, and the sea itself
is a denial of calm under the stark
silhouette of a rusted tanker
which shadows the passage
through mangrove. At three degrees west, terns
arc as if deep into an invisible trench; it is said
that albatross may possess the soul of sailors
who drowned at sea, but he thinks
it may be the arrival of lapwing
from that far murdered country
of Blackpool's domestic waters. The charts,
moored in cockroach droppings
and the sent of gin, detail
the tide's marginalia. He enters

a whole music of silence.

The entire length of her bow
eclipses the brown sky's
access into a place no one ever
touched before. The sails

bleached into newness. The craft
circles an ordered series
of wheat green pools; the ship
charged by the closing light.

The wars in the hull
ended and he once forgot

the flat rim of a cardboard box
in which he had stuffed
a collection of feathers from passing
gulls as proof of angels.