for Steven Speilberg
Grand martial of the unslept in this night,
the working class woodsman growled,
in this night was a shiver, a welt; one wicked night
hurt gust after the other night
Bare-backing each of its citizens, a phantom lung a
phantom’s
BARE lung a phantom sickness, lakeshore
was full of metal,
rust and briny misfortune. I didn’t have to flip
through books
about the sea or the navy to
experience claustrophobic
feeling of shirt-tailed snot nose men anne
women bludgeoned by
Life’s slopes and scowls as waves censored
pity the beach as black as night and the tall ships;
some buoyant,
some a tease, some paintings or chalk rende
rings, museumed,
restored or destroyed in the icy ports or abando
ned sold off
in shipyards recycled into porch decks.
The roofer, the secretary trainer, the tennis tutor,
paper girl burglar, the acrid apprentice: each a disgust
ing pirate, smuggling food in lunch moustaches, in gusts
and foul fingernails buffeting away in
front of my own sense of peace and harmony with the
universe in the laxity of night.
I gazed gaily at a sawed-off skate sharpener smoked
in an alley. His goon of a son, wearing a pee-wee boys
hockey varsity coat sold toothbrushes and ink pens in a
metal can.
Grand martial of the unslept in this night, the wood
pecker wimped out, sleeping in my sock drawer,
next to a waterlogged locket from
the SS INDIANAPOLIS
Nathaniel G. Moore is a Toronto author and editor. He is the author of Let’s Pretend We Never Met and Wrong Bar. He just completed a book of poetry called This Is The Zodiac Speaking.
