Salt and Lotos

Back and forth, Aruba, Nevis, St John, Kingston—all bout the Caribbean. India, too. I come back to this spot a wiser man, more troubled than I was.

What did I see over there? Pyramid. The Black Sea. Ships in drydock. Equipment, smokestacks, buildings. A lot of cargo passed through my ship.

Refractory individuals beat me up in Argentina to take off my watch. A man spit on me in South Carolina I wipe it off and turn back to the ship.

Them used to joke and call me a ship rat for I never leave my cabin much after that, but I study to take charge of my own vessel.

You have to be firm with the men: don’t put up with any slackness. Maybe if I was a harder man— but when a ship was offered, I refuse.

That was then. I hear the Siren went for scrap in a Florida yard 10 years on its back off Key West. Time was ripe. I understand.

But I am here, yes? Tell me this: Some of us spoil like mango early on, from the start, you understand. What but to throw them overboard?

What but that? You cover so much water. It look salt, blue, same, rough. A madness take us one day off Tenerife. It was the gulls. The screech screech.

Six hands jump off the fore deck. A mate hold onto my trouser leg. When I wake up the sky was black and blood all over from the mutiny.

You notice how my speech change? More I talk, more I remember the way I used to talk as a boy. All the travel don’t erase that.

One day outside Gibraltar the ship start to wobble. The iron creak. The wheel wouldn’t stay firm and I wrestle with it back and forth.

I used to drive jeep in the country on road where the vehicle go to collapse. Never like that sea. We reach the Pillars and just as we leave them

it stop. Bare calm cross to America. But half-way over when the land fall off a white man draw gainst the ship in a motor boat and ask for some food.

So we give him a keg of water and vitamin C and some dried fish with the flat bread that we eat it with and the captain ask where is he going.

The man face straight at the captain and tell him that he don’t know but once upon a time a hill “stuck out of the water with gods on it.”

The preacher say a few words before we finish load up the boat. The crew was dead and buried how long now? It was him alone left.

Once in Okinawa I see a fisherman eat a fish just catch raw. I see in Brazil a woman cook a parrot that still talk as she drown him.

I sail to Cape Verde, then come down the side to Angola and Good Hope and see kiwi bird and Maori warrior just like you see them in a book.

But this white man was the most odd. What him was doing out there? And that little motor boat! Who him going to tell when him drown?

I hear that there is the belief that some man who go to heaven talk without any throat to talk through. I won’t say any more than that.

Him shove off with the boat hook and point out a spot (as if to himself) that none of us not even the lookout even glimpse. And then the fog start in.

What you think happen then? Gone clean like a fire burn him up! For when the fog lift—one hour— nothing but water and more sea to cross.

I think is that man make me retire. Some of the crew look for him for a month. Man never sleep. Some of them claim to see a hill

and put on life jacket and go into the sea after it. When we send in a rowboat them refuse to come back; them look...