FINAL POEM AS TIDALECTIC ELEGY

“The Middle Passage, rather than haunting us, is still open . . . with water flowing forth in a constant, violent rush.”

In the wake of departure and salt spray, who looks back?

In the wake of Atlantic afflictions, of this liminal black.

In the wake of the taken-in, of ruptures in the track

of a sea being entered and what entered ever-swallowed.

The wake unseals epitaphs from throats thought fallow.

The wake spits up familiars, flesh and splinter alloy.

The wake blamed for the neglect-fed nations

that sculpt indifference, fluent disdain: sunken Africans

will give AIDS to the sharks, spoke a failed civilization.

Dear wake, if my body is 70 percent water, how

many likenesses have I imbibed? What shrouds

prepare to disclose their semblances within me, bountiful

with the sweat of the thrown-overboard,

the jumped-into-freedom, before the Lord

could be given like a disease. Freedom bored

with freedom’s language. The necessary

revision, meaning’s umbilicus severed. Dull pageantry:

cloud shadow in the water, blackened dinghy,

ephemera over ephemera. Legalese

of ghosts, an eroded investment, cargo seized

up in the ship’s wake, a recapturing, a chronic disease,

an annotation, sharp asterisk, perpetual annexation.

The waves repeat their inexact canon,

their mimetic self-mastry painting a scene

of endless transposition. What is the within?

What is in the shipping news? The Marine

List: La Amistad, Aurore, Duc du Maine,

Trouvadore, Emanuela, Britannia (1783),

Britannia (1788), Wanderer, HMS Monkey,

Enterprise, Alexander, Sugar Cane, Henrietta Marie,

Othello (1781), Othello (1786), Antelope,

Queen Anne’s Revenge, Robert, Hope,

Angola, Thomas Hunter, Nightingale, the HMS Black Joke.

In the Mediterranean Sea over which a French warship,

like a squall, gasps and freezes at the vista

darkening with hunger, its sailors taking pictures

of Nigerians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Sudanese,

as their dinghies lose their utterances in the sea.

The Mediterranean glances at itself in migrants’ eyes,

unbalances the boat for a closer look,

while Europeans burn history from their books

and use migrant hair to bait their hooks.

~

“I had a dream you were the ocean”