For my uncle, Theodore Ortiz November, 1955
I think of you standing on the sloping deck
as the freighter pulls away from the coast of China,
the last lights of Asia disappearing in the fog,
and the engine’s drone dissolving in the old
monotony of waves slapping up against the hull.
Leaning on the rails, looking eastward to America
across the empty weeks of ocean,
how carefully you must have planned your life,
so much of it already wasted on the sea,
the vast country of your homelessness.
Macao. Vladivostak. Singapore.
Dante read by shiplamp on the bridge.
The names of fellow seamen lost in war.
These memories will die with you,
but tonight they rise up burning in your mind
interweaving like gulls crying in the wake,
like currents on a chart, like gulfweed
swirling in a star-soaked sea, and interchangeable
as all the words for night-la notte, noche, Nacht, nuit,
each sound half-foreign, half-familiar, like America.
For now you know that mainland best from dreams.
Your dead mother turning toward you slowly,
always on the edge of words, yet always
silent as the suffering madonna of a shrine.
Or your father pounding his fist against the wall.
There are so many ways to waste a life.
Why choose between these icons of unhappiness,
when there is the undisguised illusion of the sea,
the comfort of old books and solitude to fill
the long night watch, the endless argument of waves?
Breathe in that dark and tangible air, for in a few weeks
you will be dead, burned beyond recognition,
left as a headstone in the unfamiliar earth
with no one to ask, neither wife nor children,
why your thin ashes have been buried here
and not scattered on the shifting grey Pacific.
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