That night, in my inner cabin room, I examine one of the bright quills carefully, stroking it against the grain, and wedge it into the band of my hat. A shipmate summons me with a bald knocking — the rats have cracked a barrel of wormwood and are stumbling about the hold. They’ve become emboldened, are approaching deck hands with curious noses and mouths. I go to examine the ravaged barrel, slats splayed out like so many petals of some stiff flower, and find a quiet cricket whose heart has seized from just a lick of the stuff. In time the rats will drown themselves with their confusion, but in the meantime I watch to make sure they don’t ravage more of our store.
In Al Bayda we pick up an extra cask of gentian so that we might make bitters on the ship: to aid in digestion, to pour down the throats of the seasick, to doctor our drinks.
In a Somalian market I pick up a banana with my left hand. In India, I say the word “no.” In Yemen, I grasp the sleeve-covered wrist that a woman offers to me in greeting. Once word has spread of our presence, every passable window’s shade is drawn, every child is yanked inside. There is no telling what will be traded next. It seems impossible to behave ourselves. It is certain we’ll offend some subtle complexity of etiquette.
In Piraeus we ask for fennel by its Greek name. “Marathon? Marathon?” We say the word to each market vendor until someone nods. It was a stalk of fennel that Prometheus used to steal fire from the gods, and when the vendor botches the exchange rate, giving us ten dozen potted fennel plants for the price of five, we feel as triumphant. Sailing out of port that night we are glad not to be chained to a rock, having our liver devoured day after day. We do not, however, escape unpunished. Within a fortnight a flutter of mouse moth larvae have hatched from the soil of the plants, and tug bites out of our woolens. They hover densely around our candles, casting the ship into unsolvable darkness.
The barrels and sacks of seed and silk, the burlap wrapping the roots of the seedlings form a pulpy poetry all their own, and on days at sea, the light shining into the hold from punched-out knots in the wood allows me to read the names stenciled on each vessel. My wife’s voice rings through my head, sounding the fractured lineage of our cargo: frankincense from the land of Punt, Pippali from Kerala, sweet wood from Indonesia, amomum from Bengal. My eyes land on a bale of myrrh and I think of Berbera, where we were shown the purposeful wounds inflicted on commiphora trees to draw out the resin. All so that once we returned home our worship would have a scent all its own. In time, my wife’s voice becomes dead and still in my memory. I can hear only the sounds of foreign birds made familiar over time and the many names of one spice in the disjointed language of the markets. Cinnamon, cassia, róu gúi, cannella: they all mean the same.
When the ship’s stays start to creek with the weight of our supply, we turn around. I pace the decks trying to remember my wife’s name, and thinking of how to ask for forgiveness if it won’t come to me. When I attempt to look back on the life that waits for me at home, the mirror reflects only on the smell of the lurching sea and the crisp-sounding snap of an aloe leaf, split and oozing focus onto my relief. I’d grown sunburned and bristled in a way that would not be familiar to her on my return. But even with as much as I’d changed, and even having lost the details of her entirely, I assumed that nothing about my wife would be different. I was sure that when I walked through that same old door, the recognition would crescendo between us and the scent of her skin would break through the curry powder and thyme and ginger, and her gentle smile would cause me to begin forgetting in the opposite direction.
Roundabout the Bottom
Until now I have been desperate and young all my life. A whirlpool’s spider webbing a ship, and I am on duty, receiving the distress signals. They light up my brain with their ciphered knocking. I can only guess at what they’re saying. I cheated on my Morse code tests. The water hikes itself up around them. Their noses goggle, filling with sea. They crumple deeper. The sunken six hundred struggle inside the ocean. I stay up all night thinking of ways to retrieve a ship from roundabout the bottom of the sea. I drag out maps and periscopes. I find a compass and a barometer. I can’t swim, but I change into my bathing suit. I consider hurling myself off the dock and dragging each sailor up one by one. The water beetles grow fat with salt. I know it is too late, but still it’s my duty to dredge them up without letting anyone know my mistake. Bells ring inside of me, telling me to do something else and then something other than that. Alarms sound. I don’t know where to go. The possibilities keep splintering. My mind turns over and over like a weak ankle. The waves violin above them; a telescope can give me that sight. My marrow curdles with ignorance. I recognize my lack of reason, and I purge my apologies into the night air. I offer only my grief as recompense.
Tangle
My sister is curled around the tower like a ribbon. Venus gladdens in the sky as I try to talk her down, but seven intact sunrises later, she’s still there, the solitude snarled in her hair like wind. I try to run my fingers through her disastrous ringlets but probable accidents begin to rustle between us and I give up. Dark parlors are vacant beneath her eyes and even I am praying for an aperture to open already, for some light to reach in and unknot her. A lyrical and nagging lack in me prevents me from understanding what makes her do this: like a pane of glass sanctioning off a part of my mind.
Someone deceived her; an owl perhaps.
There are pleats hidden in our heritage hiding gaps it will take much time to unfold.
There is magic all around her that does not tell the truth.
My sense of direction trembles when I get near her, like a compass near a magnet. When I try to reason with her, she yields only the half-syllables of infancy or full-martyred stories of the women who have gone before her.
I have lost my gramarye; it wriggles now somewhere in the wrong person’s hands. Without it, I haven’t the slightest idea how this situation will be remedied. The illogic of the good has been flossed away; malignant nonsense remains, unclaimed. I am using “nonsense” here to mean “recognition.” I have seen this happen before and prayed the nomenclature would not come back into use, that the eternal would reverse and never ask another question.
I hire a gentleman to help, to chip her fingers from the brick while I tenderly pry the ivy strands of her hair from the mortar. Her connection to this castle, chaotic and forbidden, buzzes through us like gripping a miniscule current with spit-veiled palms. We work gently and carefully, fearful of the disease patterning out to us. These gradual and tiny distances separate her from her dependence. Pulling her from this foundation is much like dislodging young poems from the beaks of hummingbirds. The power and delicacy at once astound us.
Each point connects with a rigid and forceful pulse, but as we lever her away from this landmark, she loosens, her edges going almost liquid. This work wracks our nerves, never knowing if the girl we crow from this architecture will be able to recover, will survive the withdrawal from this behemoth to which she’s been clinging.
When the surrendered self of my sister lands in my arms, the true work begins. I can tell you: a fine talc settles between us and within us, evenly filling us to the brim. Our perspectives pare again and again as we fight to understand the other. We tug at the skin of each other’s sentences. I find she has the looping reason of the psalmist and I know if the way I think is a library, then it is full of larks. To calm her, I weave lavender into her hair, blazed into a shock of gray at her release. When we are at a loss, we teach our mentalities ventriloquism, and find comfort in the sympathy and compassion we’re able to rumble out at a moment’s notice. Each day threatens whims until the petals of the town bells sound and we allow ourselves to sleep and forget.