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Sport 39: 2011
In memory of my great grandfather Heinrich Augustus
In memory of my great grandfather Heinrich Augustus
from The Lifeguard (10)
Wrapped in grey air,
the city might be a roiling fog-bank
shot through with iridescent gulls
in patterned flight
or a poor sailor’s mirage of angels
skating on icebergs
in that secret ocean they warned him
to steer clear of
because under the alluring lustre
of sliding lights
lay a great chasm that plunged
all the way down to Hades,
though others muttered that this
was where the world’s surplus drained
once it had been earned
by the hard work of sailors
and their brothers on land
heaving coal into capital’s maw.
page 239
But even down there
you can’t get your hands on money
and if you could, what use
would that be? It’s in this world
and in this life that
happiness hangs in the air
like a veil of glittering mist
he knows will part
on a day be believes
is nearing at the same rate
the log line shows
in the ship’s dwindling wake.
He bequeathed his boys those
blue Baltic eyes, and the crooked
front tooth that gives their grins bite.
His ghost leans in the window
on nights when the wind chokes
with lit-up plastic bags.
There’s a sudden smell of
schnapps and salt in the room
and brined herring with
Estonian dill pickle—herrlich!
‘Maria Reepen, are you there Feinsliebchen?
It’s your sailor boy
page 240
who can’t rest in the old
flax swamp by the river-mouth
where mullet ride the tide upstream
through sepia cowshit.
What happened to the water
that resembled moonlight
through ice? I need to know
what your cool eyes were looking at
the last time I saw them, Maria,
flooded with silence.
I think they’d turned inward
and were sizing up the abyss
that opened through you
like a great whirlpool
or like a hollow cone
whose vanishing point
pierced the material world
and touched oblivion.
I think I heard something
like that silence once
when thick mist came
down through the rigging
off Punta Arenas, a place known
for its wild winds,
page 241
and even the ship’s creaking cordage
was quiet. Then the top’s’l
cracked tight and the ship
leaned forward again
into air like clear water.
I saw it was a new world
I’d entered, with Maria’s hands
like resting terns on the rail
and her pale hair blowing forward
the way we were sailing.’
Sleek pleasure-craft are lined up
along the marina
rattling their halyards much as
the weekend brunch crowd
rattles its plates. The tide sighs out
taking the city’s filth with it
and we all wait for it to
breathe in again
across a brief silence, a kind of airy clearing
that almost goes unnoticed.