Babo Speaks from Lima

Babo Speaks from Lima “. ..deepmemoriesyield no epitaphs” The sun like a round white bone beat our backs -press borne westward by the chains of that world turning and whipped by wind tattering shrouds furled even against the broad black shoulders of night beat the caulked boards, our bare feet burning, our wounds salt-stitched and raw; beat the ocean’s eyes to diamonds; beat down the tiny fishes that leapt in us. What was it we wore around our blood and wishes? Some tarred covering as thin as the inside of a mirror. Something blue eyes feared for the fear reflected back at them. Judgments. Evidence. Drumheads reverberant with the beat of rowlocks and oars; beat of the prow crashing toward that vast, awful, undulating unknown; beat each of us carried between our ribs like a thousand nights alive with legs and firelight, nights I reclaimed sometimes in the quiet moments when the firmament, frozen there in the square of the open hold, seemed like a sieve through which our untold 8 6 L E V I A T H A N protests pulsed. For days 1waited. Watched. When Aranda paced the deck, my malice followed as close as the famished, fire-eyed, gale-blasted gulls which lunged incessantly at the aft. My head was a hive. The sea the field of sorghum I’d scythed before the dry wind blew in from Iberia. I could no longer remember my daughter, my wife. I sought them in the women confined alongside me, and in every eye I spied a mask I recognized. Night fell as night will fall. 1mined the eyes of Atufal and bade Dago dig a Spanish grave out of the deep. How black! How bilious, black, and sweetsick blood looks when splashed in moonlight. I retched at the raw-egg stench of it the way a boy will to smell a butchered pig. Death watched, jack-eyed and fettered. Hatchets dripped. Out of the forecastle a fowl piped in its ague. All I knew a-keel, my vision drowned, but come the sun my purpose swam through the wrack. I’d yaw even though we’d wreck. I’d barnacle. 0 master, I’d try you out to your masts-fittinglyand my hard heart crash me back toward home like a figurehead, a figurehead. -GaryJ. Whitehead A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S a 7 ...