Poetry
At Sea
Christopher Howell
Somewhere near Tenerife we saw
the Northern Lights
pulsing and arcing, a blanket of iridescence shaken out
in the wind.
Some of the old hands said it was
a bad sign
to see the lights over your left
shoulder
because that’s where death sits, smiling
and smoking
his foul cigars, though maybe that was just
a thing they said
to make our meat creep and I knew that
about death
anyway. They also said The Lights and the blue
white phosphorus
almost bright enough to read by were
twin brothers
separated at birth and placed somehow in the world
of distances
like time, that is, like something
you can’t fool
or bargain with. Flying fish kept leaping
with astonishment
into the strange night, we found them
flopping
all over the deck, glittering with
phosphorus, mad
about the sky, and unsuspecting as we
scooped them up.
I remember Isaacssen saying it was all
right to eat them:
they were probably communists. We never
knew what
he meant by that. The Lights followed us
for days
and the fish followed The Lights. And the phosphorus
kept on arguing
its point about the reliability of salt, as though
Reason mattered.