Columbus

the body, broken like a sack of bones and meat dropped from the sky, floating quietly on the flat, endless sea beneath a low grey sky—no ripple, no hurry, just the slow swell lifting and lowering him, gentle as a sigh.

no fight left, no scream, no prayer. he drifted like a cork, arms out, face half to the clouds, half to the water, eyes open but seeing nothing. the ocean neither hated nor loved him; it didn’t know his name. it simply carried him, as it carries dead whales, wrecked ships, and all lost things.

man believes he can wrestle the sea, sign treaties with it, yet it breathes, slow, ancient, patient. when he sinks or floats broken on its skin, the sea neither gloats nor mourns. it rolls on, vast, unchanged, as before the first man felt small.

and the body drifted there, turning slowly with the current, alone in that calm immensity—a tiny mark at the end of a sentence the ocean never wrote. no alliance between man and sea.

the Sunday papers,
trying to cross the channel,
makeshift dinghy