Mercy
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For weeks he has watched the still heart
of the sails, prayed for unseen breath to lift canvas from the riggings, mold the spar to an inverse cusp slight as the fold of horizon. He has prayed for a deck baptized with spume and the quicksilver bellies of fishes. But the ocean refuses to shrug, offers only August sun back to itself without blemish. In the hold beneath him, hulks of draped crates haunt the air with the odor of saffron and unspent Spanish gold too heavy for the spindly arms of his crew to heave overboard. These days, fortune is measured in ladles of fresh water, the pitted rind of an orange, flayed skin of an apple. He asks himself what more he might do and in answer turns his gaze across deck where heat shimmers, conjures specters of lanyards, cannons, the sleeping form of the boatswain’s mate-- to the place where the horses have been gathered, his favorite mare’s brisket tight against the tarnished rail, her mild eyes ringed in white like nimbuses around a sextant’s distant stars. Unashamed, he wipes the sting from his eyes, ties a kerchief around the sharp angles of her head, closing her view of endlessness, seeing, as he performs this small mercy, a rime of dried sweat circling the moss of her flared nostrils as she buries her muzzle in the barley cupped in his outstretched palm and follows him toward the wide blue gape, her chestnut flanks rising and falling like tidewater. And now a slap on her croup, hard enough to make her start, fetlocks fraying in flight as if she means to tread sheer atmosphere, then a black hoof brands a slick half-moon above his heart a moment before she vanishes in a sickle of sunlight and salt spray only to break the surface a moment after, blowing the great trumpets of her lungs, the blindfold torn loose and floating free. And now the panic of sixty more hooves driven forward by rough hands, water churning sorrel, bay, dappled grey, until pink veins of blood from brine-singed throats stain the blue like a tincture. A handful of sailors crack oars against thrashing legs to hasten the drowning, though it will be hours before the last of them stops knocking the keel, each strike like a heartbeat… or the tongue of a bell in its diminishing arc. |
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