A Ship Caught In Ice

An imagining of the last days of a rejected visionary.

News today of a ship caught in the ice, drawn into the shelter of the bay trying to skirt the headlands. Her oaken keel exposed, her bowsprit with its figurehead appealing to the heavens, thrust upward like a broken bone, caught on its last heading, south. Too little too late. The captain, huddled in his quarters, pouring over the brittle charts. The crew crumpling the last pages of Kings & Isaiah, with all their smiting & begetting, into the pot bellied stove below decks where floors are day by day becoming walls. A pot thaws in the mess but rawhide boot bindings &

There in the spyglass a mile out, a ship trapped in the ice. Her bowsprit gammy like a narwhal tooth or a shattered harpoon shank. Her broken keel yawing gradually windward in the vice, spars straining.
The crewmen long since walked to shore in mutinous twos & threes & left the captain his stubborn vigil. He alone in his listing quarters skipping & pirouetting calipers back & forth over the chart where surely there be monsters, while the compass spins & spins & the last candle sputters out.
And why? What bittersweet memories of quayside farewells warm his bitter nights as he crumples the dog eared pages of Kings & Isaiah, with all their smiting & begetting, into the cast iron pot belly of his tilted berth? What little it matters now, his floors day by day becoming walls, his world upended, girdled & gripped.
Orcas hunt the edge of the pack ice, their fins slicing the one thing he dreams of most, open water, freedom, their spouts rainbow in the half moon. Aurora borealis shimmers in the frosted rigging by night while pearls & whelk shells, herring bone combs & ivory buttons bleach into sailors valentines on the beach in the last of the setting winter sun.
All this in my spyglass, about a mile out.