Endurance

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Like a signal from a sailing merchant ship

A reluctant sigh announced my pending departure.

I peeled away from the breezy white blankets

And watched them furl around you tightly

Then rumbled out of bed and out to sea

A heavy and lethargic mass of

Puffy peach flesh pressing forward

With sassy-seaman threatening

Mutiny at every bodily station.

That’s how I remember it.

I left you long ago.

And each day since has been the same

Wearing the soggy layers of yesterday.

Whether upright on the side of the bed

Or locked in ice floes in the polar south

I wish I’d never left the warmth of your body.

Only in the night does my heart thaw

Behind closed eyes

When a glimpse of the sun arrives

Over the gentle waves

Your breathing makes

With your chest raising and falling.

If it were real, I’d never leave it again

Now the memory is all that I have left.

Oh sweet terra firma.

Your direction north.

My success unlikely.

The men daily search my face 

Tracing the lines beneath celestial eyes

That they may see in it what

Mountains of seal carcasses can’t say—

What our dogs frozen in blood once howled

And polar winds incessantly scream.

Still, no mouth will speak it

That they too I must leave or

Conscript us all to certain death

On what was and is 

My own self absorption—

The myth of what is me

I myself installed at the helm.

I’m hopelessly lost.

The Weddell Sea it seems  

Shall be the end of me,

A seafaring captain

On a voyage of endless searching

Drawing upon a tattered map 

From a dream-filled drawer

To chart another leg 

Seeking what is meaningful in life

Plying the ice water for any place better 

Than where I last stood solid

Discovering over and over again 

It was always there in you.