Endurance

By Justin Larson

Like a signal from a sailing merchant ship
A reluctant sigh announced my pending departure.
I peeled away from the breezy white blankets
And watched them furl around you tightly
Then rumbled out of bed and out to sea
A heavy and lethargic mass of
Puffy peach flesh pressing forward
With sassy-seaman threatening
Mutiny at every bodily station.

That’s how I remember it.
I left you long ago.
And each day since has been the same
Wearing the soggy layers of yesterday.
Whether upright on the side of the bed
Or locked in ice floes in the polar south
I wish I’d never left the warmth of your body.
Only in the night does my heart thaw
Behind closed eyes
When a glimpse of the sun arrives
Over the gentle waves
Your breathing makes
With your chest raising and falling.
If it were real, I’d never leave it again
Now the memory is all that I have left.

Oh sweet terra firma.
Your direction north.
My success unlikely.

The men daily search my face
Tracing the lines beneath celestial eyes
That they may see in it what
Mountains of seal carcasses can’t say—
What our dogs frozen in blood once howled
And polar winds incessantly scream.
Still, no mouth will speak it
That they too I must leave or
Conscript us all to certain death
On what was and is
My own self absorption—
The myth of what is me
I myself installed at the helm.

I’m hopelessly lost.
The Weddell Sea it seems
Shall be the end of me,
A seafaring captain
On a voyage of endless searching
Drawing upon a tattered map
From a dream-filled drawer
To chart another leg
Seeking what is meaningful in life
Plying the ice water for any place better
Than where I last stood solid
Discovering over and over again
It was always there in you.

****

Justin Larson is a former Marine, currently working as a civil engineer. He recently published “Lunkers” in The Thunderbird Review. Justin frequently rides a BMW adventure motorcycle across the country in constant study of the world. His gas-stop-recollections of the previous 150 or so miles provide the clay for what he makes in the future.