I was wrong about the boat I’d seen that afternoon. It wasn’t a fishing trawler but the salvage boat, out panning for deep gold on New Year’s Day, searching for the drowned lode of a squandered Spanish empire. That former state trooper called later night, sweaty for a drink, needing to talk with another drunk. I tell him how hard it is for me to avoid the whiskey sometimes, when I just want to drown away all memory of Jan and Brendan, when the work of taking another breath just doesn’t seem worth it -- when my tongue trembled to carve those three words which kills most drunks: Aw Fuck It ... I tell him it’s pure grace that keeps that drink from my lips, poured into me when I say a prayer for help; grace to that there is a next right thing to do and reaching for it is like reaching for a white chip, surrender with shoe leather. And it always helps to have a fellow drunk to tell about it, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to do so. He sighs Yeah and seems to settle. We talk on for a while. He asks me what I do and I say not much, just got the settlement, going to try beach life for a spell, regroup, do some odd jobs, write a bit, stay away from women, you know, He tells me that the boat had found some interesting stuff that day just off Malion Beach, some larger iron tackle, an intact wine bottle, even a few gold coins. The crew unloaded from the boat excited and motivated, telling him to get things in order for a three-day foray the next day. There was a feeling of immanence in the air, even he got caught up in it, but when he got back to his trailer that night it collapsed, turned to its other. He just sat on the couch staring at the spot on the coffee table where he used to keep the framed picture of the family before he couldn’t stand to look at it any more. I tell him he can reenter that picture if he keeps working on this thing. Just keep coming back, I told him, stick around for the miracle. Sometimes it’s just platitudes, but drowning men can hold on to those where sufficient men simply flounder down around them.
We ring off and I return to my iMac, diddle a while on some prose, randomly open folders containing thousands of poems that never emerged from their digital stables. I know I shouldn’t but I then open the folder of photos, jacketing myself in an iron maiden of memory: Jan and I over her parents place in the first flush of courtship, sitting together at a piano banging out pop ballads from a cheat book; Brendan sitting on the beach at three, eating sand; the three of us at Disney World, snapped by a Norweigian tourist whose thumb blurred the bottom left of the frame, obscuring half of me, that part that survives. I look outside the big rear window at the sea, all black now, the sky above in dark grey toil, whorling, breezing hard. A few lights flicker far out and then nothing. That’s where I see my face in the window, a distant phosphor, travelling like a shaman’s swooning soul into infernal regions of woundedness, ferrying a song that has black wings and a terrible beak as far out there as it needs to go. Jan in a coracle, Brendan in a cradle spinning and turning on that tide, no longer needing me, sighing for me to let them row on to oblivion, but how can I? My face like a moon tiding them round the world through its oceans, remitting something as they revolve. Or maybe just waiting for that grace to hand me a sextant up from the wash, something that will lead me back to this next life.
Whatever. I power down the iMac and settle down with Moby Dick for the night -- again, again -- eerily solaced by its big black music, its unavoidable end. Winds picking up outside, whipping and bracing the house, opening lower stops of the organum, cooling things off. Melville’s gnostic tongue lashing back at that wind, defiant of its God and white agency: How can I pray to that same God for help? Yet I do. Maybe the only way to Him is through Melville, through his hell, aboard his melancholy black ship where mercies are small and tides are too great. At least in the reading.
