A Magazine of Many Arts

for Greer Gilman

Night after night, your father’s house
filled with the ghosts of sailors who did not drown,
the whale-voices of their sonar
eddying from the click and ping of washing dishes,
their wet footprints crowding the shower
that left no steam on the finger-painted glass.
Under the moon, they picked out shadows
deft as pencil-sketched pin-ups—
cigarette smoke and crew cuts,
the bare-chested glint of dog tags and sweat.
When you snapped on the bedside lamp
to men’s whispered laughter,
seventy years of acey-deucey
scattered in the blank wash of light.
And always the humming blast-furnace bore of the engines,
the vibrating skin of steel that sweats beneath the sea
like the heartbeat of the war
that took your father
and gave him back with his inventions
like your stepfather with his book,
the ghosts with their lives,
phantoms only of their Pacific years
until the day they vanished
as if folded away in a shell-braced suitcase
with navy shirts and journalist’s notes
to await the second coming of the Cunard-White Star Line,
as if put ashore in a strange country
of love between earth and air
to take the places of selves gone under sea.