The Ark

Matthew Henson, American explorer. Photographer Unknown. ©1910 Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress.

The effect of such storms of windand snow, or rain, is abject physical terror,due to the realization of perfect helplessness.”

—Matthew Henson, African American Arctic Explorer
Co-Discoverer of the North Pole, 1908

What makes a child of nine decide to sneak out of his home in the middle of the night and never return? How does a child understand the world is as much her mother as the human being who gave birth to her? When does the child on the run come to understand that the body is the womb?

You, Matthew, you.

You step out into a road in Maryland, 1873. You are nine. Who are you, nine year old little boy, hiding behind trees from night riders, wrapping blankets around your shoes, walking across a farm at night, knocking at a stranger’s door, begging for food?

Your mother, your poor mother. And now your father—dead—too.

Lemuel

Caroline

Ii

Early morning. Still dark. I am in a taxi. The most elegant ‘ti Kreole in the world is on the radio. I catch a sliver and think how one tiny word can be sacred, an artifact, the only green thing that returns inside the beak.

okra

We stop at a toll. It is just a toll, a toll like any toll, but I am thinking, we are all the children of immigrants, none of us come from here. And I wonder if the toll-taker ever imagined that one day it would be this mask in the back seat, or that mask on the driver.

The toll-taker smiles. I smile. We all smile. It is nine degrees outside. For a moment I am underwater and can’t remember which city I am in. Not Boston, but London, Dublin maybe. Or maybe cities no longer exist. Maybe they are all beginning to shrink away, plane by plane, brick by brick. A woman lying dead on her couch for three years watching television.

And then, perhaps because I am suddenly unsure of which town I am in, or which town I will be in by evening, the thought to pass through my mind next is, “And just what is so wrong with being destroyed?”

Iii

God bless the kitchen cook who answers the back door and offers the child a cot.

God bless that mother who thinks, dusting her hands off on an apron, one more mouth under the roof won’t matter much.

God bless the man who decides he will teach you everything he knows, and then does, every afternoon in his cabin on the ship for five years straight.

God bless your first piece of white chalk.

God bless the pregnant black slate.

Iv

A child was found. Buried. In a coffin. A child was found. Someone had placed a mask over her chest. On either side of her body was a man and a woman. Also buried. The child was placed between their legs. At some point between 330 and 390 AD, all three were placed together in the Ipiutak Graveyard, near Point Hope.

V

“The earth is currently in an interglacial period . . . The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.”

“In every culture, the oldest memory is water.”

Vi

“Tell me again about the flood . . .”

Vii

(for Alondra Nelson)

“We went to sleep in a village, but awoke in the ocean.”“The world was still flat then.”“I remember there was a Great Fish—She kept warning of a deluge.”“The sky was a skin of blue crystal.”“There were no stars—no moon, nor seasons.”“All the ice suddenly melted.”“We’d believed it was just a story old people told to frighten the children.”“The sea rose up and took all the land...