Balsero

after Luis Cruz Azaceta's screen print Fragile Crossing

Tell me, Our Lady, why must I see stars in the green billows, twinkling to harbors safe as shrines, when it's just the gouged eyes of angels blinking over sea hillocks with sulfurous peaks, crags that spritz devil's spindrift, wavelets sharp as my machete that cut black cane in Camagüey, a concentration camp on a bluff, condemned three years for defaming the State. All I did was shout Fuck, Fidel! in a bread line. A horde scored my tongue, broke bones, jabbed needles in the quick of my nails. That first year I almost died of typhus, later on pneumonia, afterward malaria. They call me Lazarus of the Sea. I row against time, against the sidewinding waves, against the flotsam of cyclones, my boat that crumples like cardboard, my oar a Cyclops' toothpick, my tin compass from an old Cracker Jack box. Prayers fade fast in the blue fog of twilight, & I weep tears of bilge, moan the shrapnel wind, touch the eyes of the Archangel Gabriel. Don't waste your breath, he says. God is deaf, mute, & blind, might as well be dead. Grace is a castaway like me, & Faith one more wreck on the sea floor.