Galleon
Three months out from Manila
Scurvy creeping on aboard like poison fog
Prayers and rosaries worn down among salt-dried fingertips
One sailor’s childhood wounds resurge
And bleed ragged like new again. There will be more.
A storm, boiling down from the undiscovered Alaskan
Gulf, frays every will’s fiber until the strands are torn
And hope curls into a fetal ball. What porcelain, what spice,
What silk is worth those bodies sliding into the deep
Sewn into sailcloth, but now perhaps
Finding some kind of peace in the cool silence there.
One day those gray false lines of landscape turn true
Punta Concepción rises dreamlike in the east.
Revived, those sailors still able to climb their rig
Are up in a moment and hope lifts every breast.
The coast is less a haven than a wall to guide
The wind and waves, and turning south
The ship, grown heavy of weeds and shell beneath
Still finds her steady way. New to the route
The captain stands in close when the light is good
But lifts her clear of danger to the west at night.
With five weeks of coastal rhythm, Acapulco begins
To seem possible again. Endless northwest winds and current
Have warmed their blood and bodies until the world seems
Gentle in its turning. But one day, as evening draws in
A blue haze to the east, the sailors are silent, ill at ease.
A gray line stands far off the starboard bow
Where nothing should be. They bear off to the west,
Climbing as high as the beaten sails and foul bottom
Will allow. It will not be enough. Bahia Vizcaino
That ancient bay of whales and shoals, curls its eddies
Around them, slow and somber in the last embrace.
Embayed: in the sailors’ ancient tongue, empeñado. Their lives
Pawned away in the deep crescent of that bay, driven gently
But firmly, wearing back and forth, by morning all souls
Aboard now know the voyage will soon end.
Fear fingers its way under each one’s ribs, finding the space
It will choose when the time is come. In the distance
There is something white, a low murmur, rising slowly.
When it comes, the surf holds back a bit, and she settles
Stern-to o...