For the Cause of the Ship Essex

1.

Quakers make good captains

industrious, ambitious

the sea has its own order



the exterminating warfare

against the great of the deep, ships driven like beasts,

before advancing to the
trench of that remoter sea

Captain Pollard came from the cambouse
and threatened to brain the lot of us scoundrel or no and steer the ship himself northwest to home
if we would have him chew our food for us.

and
the cowards
who just before had muttered against him

fell silent their imprecations and sought to hide quick

before he who stood first

whalebone lamps with whalefat oil were lit along the coast.
laughing, we counted fading lights as we
mocked the green young,
vomiting into the ocean, the waves lifted us and we knew a time
other than mountain time we knew the storm

a time of mountain height but of waves, not a thing but a
hidden congruence
in the ocean’s unseen parts.


2.

advice to you, who

go to sea

hide a third suit and beware the slop chest.

do not touch either for any reason, for

when you set to stripping a whale

your shirts will bear the clot of whale’s blood, stiff.

a cold bath for each man

for the dmned owners will find all means to net your scrimped purse.



unpaid, we prepared the ship for weeks before board: most come to final port
owing the owner dm him
7/8ths of their daaamned earnings, stinking of piss

home


the sea has its order
and the owners, another, and the captains another, and you, another.

there is a discipline

of the sea.

3.

I have seen his arm and head in a Chilean port.
a former governor of Auroco, Benevido. pirate.

in the eternal extension, sudden, the nothing, sudden

the attack of whale or man: his band surrounded the Hero and

the crew hid beneath the swath of hot bullets.
Captain Russel played this trick:

in shadows, he hid a crushed casing in his hand and held it up

for the crew to see: See! These piratical bullets are made of yellow butter!



The Governor escaped.
they found him alone, starving upon the road from Valparaiso.

After tying him to four horses, they displayed

the arm and head in the town center. The rest of the body was too broken to be recognizable as

leg or backbone, bone soup in the kettle of muck. I saw him again,

the Governor

his head and arm preserved, a curiosity,

in the port city of Conception.

4.

[the whale’s head is a perfectly designed battering ram: the eyes 1/3 the way down
the body.]



we drank fish for their blood the thirst so great. perish the squeemish. we
ate them scales and all. finding terrapin we left them on the deck: they will live, seemingly without eating
up to a year, and, when hollowed out, their shells proved skillets
to their brethren. A most disagreeable snakelike visage
in life. In death, succulent, bowls yielding a fat meat.

we remember
the captain’s brandy bottles tossed into the water like a band of
Indians marching, homeless now.

we caught the albatross with a piece of pork rind:

its wing span sixteen feet and we felt sorry for the bird

its blood trailed into the sea behind the Essex
sunlight on the clouded waves, and sorrow for
its passing. What was it of its kind, this bird,
or did others strike suns from the eyes of lost men?

when the Essex sunk, we took fish hooks as we scrambled from the wreck.

they have proven useless.

we took a cake of soap, too.
on the island we found
wild peppergrass, and birds that stood still when strangled.
we ate them raw until we had the strength to strike fires
on the beach: it was water we needed, and wept
when the porous rock hinted at a source later proved barren.

I did not weep for my lost children, that way, the way of the

lost water, but finally, a spring was found on the extreme verge of the ebb tide. we

drank from it in turn: in barrels, the
brackish water settled and swelled the limbs
of the men who impetuously downed too fast a pint.

we taught the dumb gulls to fear us, and men murmured for the chest where I guarded
the last of the pig and ship bread. one man stood down
at gunpoint after stealing a crust.
I showed mercy, but would not again.

land crabs, tropic birds, flying fish,
we set the flames in terrapin shells but
soon were drinking piss
when the spring dried and we tried to bottle rainwater from sails.
the salt of the sea was so heavy in them.
we were soon lost again to the mercy of the horizon,
and to that saltcrypt of brandy bottles which
once drifted past the edge of the wake.

5.


friends, please,
a sweet image
of the reminders of the order of God.

Thirty hogs in the isle of May
Duff everey other day
Butter and cheese as much as you cou’d sway
And now you want more beef dm you.

then
Richard Peterson, a pious man, a black, sang hymns we thought
right to sing in peace
the boiling sea, rain on the bread and nails, the pillars of salt.

6.

When Isaac Cole went mad,
He called for his napkin and water.

We turned and winked and psalmed.


We damned God for what we do.

We sewed up his chest after taking his heart.

We sewed up his chest after eating his heart
Cooked in a terrapin’s shell.

We sewed up his chest after eating his heart
As we cooked his green flesh in the green shell.

7.

Some whale is any whale. Or was this one

a deviation? This this this. This whale.

by quadrants, we took

to above the trade wind, heading to the Chilean coast and not the wild Society Islands

as Pollard first suggested. We feared the cannibals of the West.

This was the way of unslaked and sun-scalded men, by

men who see the hulk of their home descend at awful and insistent pace into the house of whales,

sighing that death

is not a mimic but a landscape.

The secret means of the horizon.

8.

A whaling ship is a frail concern.
Built as light on waves, a hollow boned bird, to the point of collapse but not quite. 20 men escaped

the wreck of the Essex. Of 6 blacks,

all died.
a shark is no shadow
and we hacked at him,
at first in annoyance,
then terror. our imaginations shortly became diseased, our bodies
wasting.

as the men died, we thanked them for a drop of blood

and adored the floating bones, too weak to stone to the deep.

the boats were lighter on the collapsing waves.

a longing frenzy, we loved them
and had sung, my cousin drew his lot and lay on his side, saying
spare me the last drink, it is no longer mine
and it seems to me now
the body is a frail concern.

Brazillai Ray, Samuel Reed, a black, mad Isaac Cole
Richard Peterson, the Pious, who gave us comfort,
Lawson Thomas, a black Charles Shorter, a black
Isaiah Shepherd, a black and the missing William Bond, black.




9.

who survives?




and if we must perish to die in our own cause.