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Gust Martin
- The Kent State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
9 G U s t M A R t I n Sea His teeth were continental, darkly split by ocean. on his merchant marine Id, his lips are closed. His english, broken, breaking against the margins of the sea. His mouth—dormant with unused muscles—grew fluent in tongues of water. The waves broke open, erupting in all their language, sometimes swearing in dutch, sweet-talking in German. sometimes they still spoke Greek and he remembered when water was water. The crew sang Heave ho! My lads, heave ho! Damn the submarine! until the sea rotted the bows of their lips. The doctors restitched each like binding an atlas. Back home, he swayed like a sailor—the traffic lights, held at a distance in his eyes, buoyed beneath their wires above the snowy pennsylvania streets. What can a man do once he talks his way back to a wilderness? He grew strange to himself at kitchen tables. one morning he heard his wife whisper his bastard english into a pot of boiling water. He watched her drift away while she spoke starboard to the spices. ...