American River Review 33

Veronica Brito -- photography 8" X 10"

A Sailor’s Recollection of the Second Gulf War Conveyed Over Whiskey

by Matthew Bowie (2016 issue)

After a year at sea, moonlight has no consequence;

Nothing follows but reflections in a wake,

A wave, half-green and glowing; The stars start to be stars, And the salt sting stops speaking. Drinking The vision is all – all you’re left with.

He talked like this for hours, staring

At his resin-oil filled glass, the crazed Twitching circuit twisting His mouth’s almost rusted screws Into a mechanical sneer at random moments,

You can steal anything from the sea but silence. Nights won’t bear inscription, the horizons Beggar text, and you couldn’t write on ripples, Couldn’t ask or answer the jewels, the burning sky, The lying dawn off to port, like a torch.

His cigarette flitted, glowing, silently Over, across, between gnarled fingers That had been soft when we were young.

Soon, moonlight turns away. The burning eyes Blink from the mirror air, staring, some falling toward some end, but watching even then.

He cracked his hands into fists, The levers creaking against some strain, Unclenched them like he was strangling.

The ship, that misplaced murmur,

turns into a lie, a peaceful promise stringing smoke from falling -- from falling stars. Light – from every angle – tangles with unknowable music, Music so refined it sounds like – like water brushing steel, Or wrapping itself in itself forever, in silence.

He smoked through clicking teeth, Angry the way children can get. I asked him, “Why did you leave?”

After a while, you learn to shut up, not to ask

Questions that don’t mean anything. The sea Doesn’t answer. A drunk shouldn’t either. Drink, if you’re drinking, or leave.

He blinked like he was fighting tears, But his tongue ran like a blade Across his lips to slash the last drop Of liquid. I bought the next round.

The cities – the derricks burn at night. They burn, Just on the horizon,

standing there, burning, and you don’t think death, but dawn, or don’t think at all, but stand and stare, a baby at a breast knowing more than you know, fearing less.

We drank. And we drink, and I think, and he talks Until we are drunk. Sometimes I wonder why I didn’t leave.

It doesn’t matter, after all, where the bombs fall, or the stars, Or whatever else you can see out there,

He said, and ran a cracked hand Across the withered burn insulting His near-well-shaven face, and breathed A sigh wreathed with grey-blue smoke. He declined, throughout, to see Us in our reflections, across the bar, His eyes too full of burning, Buried in a middle distance.

I try, sometimes, imagining the ship approaching Close to some edge – some limit – the shore, to learn

Who started the burning. To see. Some knowing work could have come, some sense, Some word or reason the sea couldn’t say.

He reminds me of his tides’ approach, marking progress onto land by a sign only seen in retreat, predictable from repetition, when he’s drunk like this, seeing things we will not say.

Maybe we could have earned our right to return to port,

where the lights are cool in the rocks, and the coast carries dawn and dusk, in honest rain and fogs, where life abides,

and the waves crack and roll with the city’s many voices on the land, echoed back, intact, as found.