Chapter Text
A deep enshrouding fog besets the cove,
the humid air suspended grey and thick.
His hair a mourning veil before his face,
the lace-black strands to shield him from the weep-
ing. Always one more mask to hide behind.
A droning dirge, a drum that shakes the earth
and pounds the corpse’s fist against the lid,
like lips enclosing slick pink flesh and bone,
the bloody-gummed, the gnawed and gnashed, the hoarse,
a bellow cried to quiet, cried to dirt.
This skeleton of land, this fog the breath,
and his the mouth that swallows every sound.
A bird will gouge itself on any thorn,
the splintered shipwreck’s mast another branch.
He watches as it dives with purpose toward
the puncturing: a hole clean through its heart,
and daylight on the other side to see.
Its feathers crimson, eyes a rotting green;
his fingers curl around the crutch and hilt,
imagining instead around its neck.
The rhythm stomped onto the deck by boots
into the dozens, thinner now with all
the legs that they have lost—that he has lost.
They hum and cry, they haul the lines, they keep
on marching. Work and mourning have their songs;
and this one tells of him, his hands, his voice.
True, other songs may tell of other things.
Nobody seems to sing those anymore.
The suicidal bird caws harmony,
The comfort will grow stale. He aims his gun.
It snaps the bone-bleached sky in half again.
The men reach out to usher him below
the deck, where no one dares to meet his eyes.
No matter: he has empty eyes to meet.
So empty that the chanting echoes through
the sockets, heavy brow a mountain ridge,
crevasse beneath a home to howling winds
and chanting, chanting, chanting, chanting on.
He half-expects to find the captain sit-
ting in his chair with furrowed brow to scold
him, “Easy is the enemy of good.”
“You think that this was easy?”
“Wasn’t it?”
Before he makes to argue, though, the door
swings open and then closed again, a tomb:
the cabin has been hollowed from inside,
a hollowness within himself to match.
A hollowness unfills the world, it seems,
scraped raw and hemorrhaging, and solidness
just shifting sand condemned to blow away
and leave the hollowness exposed to light—
but weight is borne beneath the earth from which
he sails away. It’s full down there. It’s full.
He tried to empty it all out, to gut
the bloated fish that swallowed pearls, and fed
to it the fullest thing he knew instead.
He washes scarlet from his skin. He finds
more red and tacky underneath. He finds
more blood and screaming underneath. He finds
his fingers raw and raw and raw and raw.
The red won’t go away; it clings to him.
Perhaps he should find comfort in the cling-
ing. Madi would admonish him for it.
She’d tell him, in that voice like Flint’s, that he
is lucky to have clinging left at all.
He sets a course for home and hopes that she
will see him there. She won’t. Perhaps it is
the shroud—perhaps she does not know he’s to
be seen beneath the funerary veil.
He tells himself that it must be the shroud.
It isn’t true: she simply does not wish
to see him, sickened by his spinelessness.
She had a blue-dark thing in hand, a deep
and velvet promise; he has leached out all
the color. He replaces every song
with it: the song they’ve written telling him.
“I told you so,” he thinks that Flint would say.
He shakes his head. “Someday, she’ll understand.”
“Will you?”
“Will I?”
“I told you that you won’t.”
“What point is there in asking if you’re sure
already that I never will?”
“I find
no joy in being right on this. I’d much
prefer to have been right about the war.”
“The war is dead.”
“Which means that I was wrong.”
“I’ll wait for her. As long as it will take.”
He tears his eyes away from where she sobs,
her quaking back, her hate, to look at Flint,
but Flint, of course, is gone for looking at.
The grief-tugged frown lives only in his mind.
No confidence to share, no second voice.
A bird impaled upon a turning spit:
it sings throughout its death, and after, too.
What good is dying if it still may sing?
He hoped the hole would shut it up, would drain
the fight and sound into the putrid sea.
Just who decides which dead things stay alive?
How many deaths until the bird goes limp?
Each sunrise dredged up from the writhing surf,
each day a bird he cuts down at the close,
each trilling song a lyric him about,
and all the while she keeps him put away.
When monarchs fall, a new one takes their place.
Flint fell and rose and fell again, and some-
where crowns were passed along the line. He took
the mantle not because it suited him
(he’s not enough a him for things to suit),
but just to prove he could, that he could fit
his shape to any costume he might don.
That he could be whatever Flint might need.
That he could be whatever she might need.
She needed him, or so he thought before.
Before he showed himself a rotted limb.
Before he saw the war a wound infect-
ed, made to cut it off to save her life,
and amputated something else instead.
It’s yet another scar for him to strain,
it's yet another scab that he must pick.
He said he’d wait, he’d give her time to rest,
but waiting drags his body ‘cross the keel,
each jagged barnacle a tool to flay
his flesh until he dyes the ocean red,
the surf a bloodstained song about himself.
He irritates her just by being here.
An irritant is not so bad to be—
he'd irritated Flint at every turn.
“And look at where that got us,” Flint would say,
if Flint could hear him now.
“I’d rather not.
It feels like looking at it’s all I’ve done.
Besides, there was no ‘us’ that could arrive
in any place save for the one we did.”
“You always said there was another way.”
“Not one that you would take, at any rate.”
Flint hesitates, a look he cannot parse—
“You’re talking to yourself again,” says Hands,
appearing out of nowhere, like he does.
“Israel, this is none of your concern.”
And Hands is aptly named: he curls, he clings,
all calluses and brittle little bones.
His orange flash of hair incites an ache,
a sour tangerine, a twitching flame,
smoke billowing from sand-encrusted lips.
He sometimes thinks that Hands is not a man,
but something from his mind made manifest,
a ghost, perhaps, a memory caught sick,
a poem in translation missing words.
Hands never speaks to anybody else;
he does no thing alone, nor lacking him.
With Nassau nestled in a buried chest,
no glory to reclaim, no prize to take,
no reputation left to be repaired,
Hands finds his purpose only in remind-
ing him of all it is that he has lost.
A hole carved through the center of a stone.
Dried herbs. A charm for fortune ill and kind.
A shark with teeth and eyes of sea glass green.
The shape of it, the fraying ends of rope:
the man called Hands exists to be his hands
when one is gripped around the crutch and one
is shaped like yapping mouths for him to bite.
“It wasn’t all the war,” he says to her.
And Madi frowns. “I know not what you mean.”
He waits until she meets his eyes and then
he clarifies: “I speak of you and I.
It wasn’t just the war which held our weight.
Our bond was built on deeper things than that.”
“If you have deeper things on which to build,”
she scoffs, “I have not seen them. I have looked.
I thought you did—I wanted to believe—
but you have shown that even on two legs
you would not stand for anything of use.”
They’ve had this argument before. They have
it every time he thinks that she might budge.
Perhaps she thinks the end will come when he
departs the island, waiting wearing thin,
but he is sick of every fucking end.
He's never had a thing that did not end.
He wanted her to be that endless thing—
and why is that so hard to understand?
It makes him now the villain in her eyes?
He never understood why Flint would care
what anybody thought of him, but now
he sees it in the purse of Madi’s lips,
the stern resentment sunk into her brow.
He finds he cannot stomach her dismay.
“Just listen to me, Madi, will you please?”
“I’ve listened long enough already, John.
But go on, say your piece a dozenth time.
My listening is of no consequence;
you talk until the words run out, and then
you talk until the words return again.
These empty platitudes mean nothing now.”
An empty platitude: his empty ribs,
and wind between the bones like dancing chimes,
all empty, empty, and the earth so full.
An empty platitude: his open mouth.
Where Flint had sharpened teeth, he points his tongue,
and hopes it orients to truest north.
“I love you, and I know it’s not enough.
Perhaps one day it may become…” he stops.
He shakes his head. “I know right now it’s not.”
“Oh, John, you do not love me,” Madi says,
“for if you did, you never would have done—”
“You’d rather I instead have loved your corpse?”
“Have you not made a corpse of me besides?
My people see me now, their would-be queen,
and only find the failures you have wrought,
the losses you have wrought. And what am I
supposed to tell them? I am loved? It’s fine,
your freedom matters not, for I am loved?
A traitor to our cause with sky-blue eyes,
who brought the pirates here and made them stay,
he loves me, and that makes it worth the pain?
You don’t love anything; you never did.
Not me, not Flint, not all the Urca gold.”
He blinks. Her hair is red. He blinks again.
“I don’t love Flint.”
“We finally agree.”
“You said it like those things are all the same.”
A blast that shocks the birds. A cresting wave.
We will have been for nothing. She resigns,
her face the sun that sinks below the line,
the light that slips away, away, to blue,
her voice a weary thing and shrouded, “I
do not have time for this today.”
“For what?”
“Do not insult me further, John, I beg.”
His nose an anchor pulling down his brows
to pinch the point she turns her back to him
and leaves him sitting in her hut alone.
He sees his own reflection in the sur-
face of his drinking water: crimson paints
his temple just as it had painted Flint’s.
He sees his imitation move its lips:
“Do you regret it yet?”
“I don’t.”
“You will.
I know you will. I always say you will.”
And in the water tinted by the tin,
his eyes return to him a seasick green.
He sits upon the cliffs remembering.
The ringing of the steel with every im-
pact: surely there is something that he missed,
a key to all the captain’s oddities
beyond his selfish, dark, destructive dream.
He had been different at the end. That’s true.
If nothing else, he knows that that is true.
The memories all stuck into the sand,
twin swords a double headstone for the plot:
he buried them upright so they might stand.
He hears it all, the begging and the birds,
the scathing accusations, every hiss.
Perhaps it lies between the sounds. He turns
his hearing towards the things which aren’t there.
He hears how Flint would taunt him with the fact:
“The pattern of my movements, can’t you see?”
And he would sigh, “No, I can’t fucking see.
I saw you try to put me in the ground,
to bury me beside that G-ddamn cache.
I saw you’d kill us all to keep it closed.
What else is there that I am meant to see?”
Flint’s hand comes up to pull aside his shirt:
a hole clean through his heart, just like the bird
that plunged onto the shipwreck’s splintered mast,
and crusted blood to decorate the wound
(a frame of many rings—first blood, and then
a sooty halo from the powder blast,
and then the ginger hairs gone dry and singed,
then freckled constellations on his chest).
“There’s daylight on the other side,” says Flint,
just like the bird that screamed the song of him.
“I blocked and parried every strike, you know.
It wasn’t what you wanted, John, nor I.”
So strange that he imagines Captain Flint
would call him John. It’s not a name that he
imagines for himself. No single name
sits fixed within his mind; to be so fixed
feels something faraway. No name at all
identifies his heart. To name a man
explains his vital meaning, in and out.
He has no meaning there to be explained.
A sound that may define him, John is not,
nor Silver, Quartermaster, Cook, or Thief.
The song about him sung across the deck,
it echoes in a shape that he may fill.
To fill a shape—does that leave it defined?
He will not ask a song to be his name.
Well, it’s not his own mind which calls him John.
He'd folded Captain Flint within himself.
It's Flint, not he, who says it so beseech-
ing, Flint examining the bloodied blade.
And, yes, Flint holds a blade, he pulled it from
the sand where it had waited. Flint has been
Odysseus before; now Arthur, too;
next, maybe Long John Silver.
Parry. Block.
Flint takes the blade, its tip pressed to the hole
left by the bullet, and he pushes in.
The wound accommodates its girth with blood
as flesh rends open, splitting, oh, the stretch,
an emptiness made full with promise of
a greater emptiness felt at its end—
the pull, the thrust, the gaping cavity,
and hilt meets rim, the quivering, the plug;
cascades of liquid follow it back out.
Flint hasn’t blinked, not once in all these months,
so why should he expect that Flint blink now?
Flint doesn’t, no, he holds him in his gaze
as cold and hard and smooth as precious jade,
and carves himself a channel to the day-
light.
“Silver—” (Is that better? Probably.
It's simpler, at least, to listen to.)
“I need to know you understand it now.”
He shakes his head. A bird upon the mast,
a block, a parry, elbow to the beak,
a blood abloom. “Again, tell me again.”
A fluttering of breath, a breeze to catch
his hair just as the sails, propelling him,
and even though the billowing obscures
his vision, Flint is plain and holding close.
“I knew we weren’t finished with our work.
You weren’t ready yet to take me on.”
Flint smiles, light and shade and in between.
“I could have killed you first, had I the want.
I could have killed you many, many times.”
His lashes just another veil—seems all
occasions call for their own curtains drawn—
he peers, and he is met, some slackened jaw.
“You’ll always be my captain.”
“You, my hand.
I’ll make you strong enough to do me harm.”
Flint bids him to return here in the morn-
ing: “Bring a blade; you’ve so much left to learn.”
He kills more birds than anyone can eat.
Each hit he lands on Flint, another bird.
It makes no difference how they start, because
when he is done with them their plumage stains
paprika red, a burnished-copper hue,
and lying in the grass their eyes shine green,
and when he plucks their feathers he recalls
the cabin of the warship, and some shears,
the restless wring of agitated hands,
and watching, half-delirious with sick,
as Flint assaulted his own scalp, prepared
himself to simmer in the braising stock.
He makes a braising stock to simmer now,
so armed with bones he spars upon the cliffs.
Some time’s gone by ‘fore anyone accepts
that he is here to stay, and lets him cook.
He'd found the galley useful, in its way,
with information gained in every bowl
and guzzled down, and spit back up, and turned
to something he could claim as agency.
Learned quick enough, he did, how to get by
on stews and simple meals the men would like
(“A hungry crew is just as good as dead,”
said Mr. Gates once, when it all began)—
but here is different: here he wants a home,
still sees it with the princess at his side,
and so on evenings warm (as every is,
the tropics balmy just as advertised)
he brings the birds into the village square.
A woman there named Dayo takes them all,
and shows him how to layer spice and herbs,
and as they burn he begs them not to sing
the song of him: You gave it all away.
He does not try to count the days—in fact,
he actively avoids the counting. Still,
when Yom Kippur comes creeping in, he knows.
His name inscribed within the Book of Life:
he’s never set much stock in it before.
A skulking thing, is faith, the way it crawls
into the mind and settles in the grooves.
Wherever possible he’d blot it out,
no proven G-d worth worshipping, no trust.
‘Twas Flint first gave him something to believe,
who bade him tuck a name between his teeth
to be spit out into the Book of Life.
Yet, as the day approaches, he atones.
He thinks about it, anyway. He thinks
of little else, save her, save Flint, save birds.
He thinks them all as though they are the same.
They’re not—they cannot be—but still he thinks.
This year he does not question he will fast.
He often finds it fatuous—he’s starved
enough to cover any Holy Day
that any of his kin might suffer through.
No Hebrew needs to fast long he still lives:
out in the calms, and buried in his youth,
and every day he passes in the square,
when Madi turns her back to him, when she
regards him, torn, with fists clenched at her sides,
he’s hungered here. The hungering goes on.
Her sun-kissed skin; he hungers in his bed.
He's ravenous, and ravenousness finds
a craving anywhere to sink one’s teeth.
Upon the sandy cliffs with sword in hand,
when splitting Flint, the guts, the sharklike grin,
his stomach squawks an empty-churning thing.
His supper when the sparring ends: the craw.
He puts the feathered Flint into his mouth.
So when it comes, he fasts to feel the lack.
It isn’t holy, isn’t righteousness;
it’s barest desperation, sans the shroud.
He finds her, asks her for a private word.
She follows him in silence to his hut.
“I’m bad at this.”
“At what?”
“Apologies.
I never give them—well, not ones I mean.”
“You mean it now, you’d like me to believe?”
“I do,” he says. “I’m sorry for the loss
I forced on you. I only ever lose,
and yours was one I knew I could not bear.
The war was never dear to me like that.
It might have saved the world, it might have not,
but it would kill you, doubtless in my mind.
You value greater things than your own life;
it's admirable—you and Flint alike.
I tried to be like you, I truly did,
but at the end of things I’m just the cook.
I want my men to have a decent meal.
I want a wife who reads with me at night.
The war would not allow for simple wants.
The two of you would never let it rest.
Simplicity and rest, by consequence,
were things to steal like any other prize.”
“The cook became the pirate king,” she says,
all cool in her regard but soft in tone,
“and like all other kings, he set his eyes
on how we live, imposing his own will,
deciding who is dead and who is free.”
“All other kings,” says Flint against the door,
blue-faced, abrasions on his neck from where
he’d been choked out, “including Mr. Scott?”
“How dare you bring my father into this!”
She doesn’t look at Flint. She looks at him.
She looks at him with fury and disgust.
She looks and she is sickened by the sight,
the veil of hair pulled back and underneath
his putrefactive flesh a maggot den,
insipid, vile, bloated—so he turns
to Flint in his confusion, open-mouthed
(that voice could not have come from his own lips),
but Flint, of course, abandons him again.
A hand around his neck, and fingertips
felt pressing in as he had pressed to Flint,
or curled around the gun—perhaps the crutch?—
the memory enshrouded in the fog—
regardless, heavy-tongued, he makes to speak,
and feels the chill and choking: “What? No, I—
I didn’t say—Oh, Madi, please don’t think—”
“I want you out of here.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“It’s never you,” she spits. “You’re never you.”
Flint sitting at the desk. Flint by the bed.
Flint tapping at the window. Flint behind
him, breathing, reaching, vanished ‘gain before
he turns to catch another glimpse of shade.
The whites of Madi’s eyes a mottled red,
and moisture at the rims, her shaking hands—
he touches; she recoils; he retracts.
“I’m sorry,” whispers he, a strangled sound.
“That’s all I meant to say. I’ve said it now.
If you should wish to hear it said again,
I’ll say it thus, and if you don’t, I won’t.
As long as you’re aware I see your pain
and know the cause, and know it came from me.
I’ll love you if it someday is enough.
I’ll love you if you cut me down yourself.
I’ll love you as I wait for you to choose.
This isn’t what you want to hear, I know.
I talk too much.” He rubs his throat to feel
the bruises left by stronger hands than his.
“I should have stopped at the apology.”
“You should have,” Madi says, lets silence reign—
King Silence, no pretender to the throne,
as all make willing subjects in their time.
The eras: King Maroon, King Piracy,
and Silence now usurping all to stay.
In silent dynasty she takes her leave.
He hunts for auburn birds to break the fast.
Some days he shuffles to the water’s edge,
where fateful winds had ferried them here first,
and sits down in the sand just like he had
when Flint, with buckets full, attended him.
The swaying of the beachgrass in the breeze,
the crested foam upon the lapping waves,
an almost-calm forgetting all the blood.
Some days he thinks that if he wanders in,
hop-step and sinking where the earth is wet,
he’d find the sea has split beneath his hand
and left him solid ground to be traversed.
Escaping always yet another yoke:
a legacy inherited which he
had left behind—or tried to, anyway.
On Simchat he will sing the song again,
the song of him, and harmonized by birds
rabbinic, skeletal, and ginger-plumed,
the only kinds there are. The only kinds.
He sees the growing storm before it lands,
the sky a greenish-grey and blending in
and down, and no distinction to be made
betwixt the churning clouds and rolling sea,
a wall of fog where air and water meet.
And everything is froth and salted drops,
and whist’ling, and his hair caught in his lips,
to sputter but to stay just where he is.
The squall eliminates the line that splits,
like smudging ink before it fully dries
or oil paints on easels bolted to
the Walrus captain’s cabin’s wooden floor.
A painting: canvas he is smeared across,
his body lost between the sand and shrubs
depicted. He is no one in the world,
and in so being none he finds he’s all.
Well, sea and sky evaporate, and so
do he and earth, and all the colors run.
They bleed together grey and thick, and he
just sits here. He just sits here. He just sits.
He lets himself be drenched by weeping clouds,
and wonders this time if he’ll wash away.
He hums it.
Parry. Block.
A droning dirge.
Emerging from the confluence of grey:
a darkened form with shoulders broad and loom-
ing, hazy-edged, and lashed onto the wheel.
The killer squall when they all should have drowned.
(He sometimes thinks that they have never left,
that they still sit becalmed and drying out,
imagining the wind and rain and sharks
and war and the Maroons and Madi, too,
hallucinating birds impaled and red;
that he will wake up famished on the deck,
in desperate search of where to sink his teeth.)
His curtained hair hangs sticking to his skin.
Flint comes to him with bloat and sagging hands,
the dappled skin a loose and steely blue,
and seafoam spittle bubbling on his lip—
all waterlogged as he had gripped him last,
and held him ‘neath the surface of the cove
where shrouding mist concealed each diving bird.
Flint opens up his mouth: wind howls out,
McGraw the keening banshee on the moor.
“O, hollow-hearted,” whistles he, “you shed
whatever weight you can: the peg, the chest.
Each anchor dropped, and tethered here you sit.
I thought by now you’d surely cut the chain.
A hollow, weeping heart. Love, all and none.
She saw you. She was right. And she was wrong.”
Flint spills, a waterfall, and rippling
as does the surface of a mug when it
is lifted to be drunk by quaking lips.
He thinks that he has seen this face before,
reflected wrong and spitting of regret,
and months of empty sitting on the cliffs.
Love, all and none; the anchored Urca cache.
“You know what Madi meant?”
“Your hands are red.”
“And yours are blue.”
“When blueness calls to me.”
“Does oft it call, as bluebirds calling dawn?”
"A siren song, increasingly. The sky—”
“The sea.”
“Your eyes.”
“My eyes?”
“Did you forget?
A drowning blue; I find it everywhere.
Don’t tell me you’ve not found me where I’ve hid.”
The blue of veins just on the other side
and shifting red when brought into the light.
He's looked for Flint in blood and sky alike,
with fingers pruned from holding him beneath.
The crash and swell of thund’rous-breaking waves
sends salt a-spray and stinging in his eyes;
seems every tear originates at sea.
“Again,” Flint says, “you’d do it all again.”
“Do what?” he asks. His palms, in answer, itch.
Without an edge the world is water, all
in congress with the air: to breathe and drink
identical in act. Yet somehow Flint
retreats, and coaxes closer with that grin,
sharp teeth a drilling beak, toward the surf.
He scrambles for the crutch and follows with
a swinging gait—he rolls across the tide
as though each step were made aboard the ship,
the pitch and sway a counterbalancing.
He lost his leg and never since set foot
on land again. He can’t remember how.
He hobbles ‘til the waves eclipse his nub,
and plants the crutch within the earth to hold
against the battered threats to lay him flat.
Before him Flint sinks down onto his knees,
his gaze a cold and catching, mouth still split
and leaking seafoam spittle down his chin.
“So do it,” comes that wind. “It’s yours to take.”
He reaches, slow as wading through the sea,
to fit his roughened hand around Flint’s neck,
thumb pressed to trachea, the bristled hairs,
a column cool as marble, moldable
where flesh has rotted sagging, clammy, blue.
His breath a ragged thing, his lips ajar,
he urges Flint below the rising tide
and comes away with feathers in his hand.
They call him Madi’s pirate, still—one thing
he never asked to be, but cannot shake,
and one to which he’s clung with bloody hands.
The queen is taken sick, and people ask
why Madi’s pirate leaves his girl alone.
“She doesn’t want to see me,” he attempts.
“I only would be getting in her way.”
But Dayo and the rest won’t simply let
the matter go—they rally all their force,
and quartermaster’s instinct grabs ahold,
to advocate the wantings of his crew
in spite of what the captaincy decrees.
He hovers in the doorway of her hut
and hesitates to knock, as though the step
and shuffle of the crutch has not announced
his every move where she can plainly hear.
He does it anyway—he raps his fist
against the frame once, twice, and sets his face
to something sympathetic she’ll receive.
“What is it?” Madi says, some sharpened steel.
“I merely came to ask you how you were.”
“I’m busy. There is much that I must do
in preparation for—”
“Your mother’s ill.”
A scathing look. “I know this. Thank you, John.
I had forgotten nothing can be true
without you to decide to make it so.”
He takes her hurt in quartermaster’s stride—
he's weathered tantrums worse from Flint before.
He lifts a hand to placate her. “I meant
you no offense, nor to imply that I
know more than you the details of your life.
Intended I to say that here, with me,
the work is less important than your peace
of mind. You’re more to me than just the heir
apparent to the Queendom of Maroons.
Your people may expect you occupied,
prioritize the changing of the guard,
but I see someone far too fucking young
to lose her parents both within a year.
And if this should weigh heavy on your heart,
as I expect it would for anyone,
I offer you a sympathetic ear.
Your suffering should not be silent-borne.
I’m sorry, still, for everything I did.
I’ve no idea how else to earn your trust
besides insist to you I never lied:
I brought him to Savannah, like I said.
I’ve kept my distance just as you have asked.
I’m off of the account. Sometimes I cook.
I’m no more pirate king than you are dead.
I’m just a man who hates to see you cry
but glad that you’re alive to shed a tear.
So if you should have need of me—”
“I know.”
“You’ll find me sitting on the cliffs.”
“I know.”
It's not tomorrow—three tomorrows next,
still sooner than he had expected it,
he pays the ailing queen his due respects
(the weight of Madi on him all the while,
her gaze and her regard, her judgement fair)
and tells her of the model she has set,
how it inspired him when once he made
to don a monarch’s crown and lead his men,
the poise and dignity she always bore:
“I never could have done as you have here.
This place has thrived in testament to you—
you and your husband both, may you be blessed
by memory of him, and not in pain—
this island now a haven from the trade
and sacrifice of lives for England’s greed.
No place like it exists I’ve ever known,
no family so strong, no birds so sweet.
Their mourning songs already have begun.
I hate to think that it should end like this.
I hope that you take pride in what you’ve built,
the daughter you have raised. I hope you sleep
in gentler hands than ever could hold me.
For space allowed to me, I give you thanks;
the only peace I’ve known was on your shores.”
And Flint with open belly stands above
her bed, blood dripping from his gaping wound,
a slash across his stomach like a pig
preparing to be roasted on a spit
and stuffed and spiced, its crackling amber skin.
He feels his mouth grow wetter at the thought.
Flint speaks, a Roman orator’s address
the way he always does—he talks of fight,
of progress, of inevitable change.
He isn’t really listening, in truth.
Flint speaks, and he is fixed upon the gut
with entrails spilling out and shimmering,
the red that seems to stain the very room.
She watches him, does Madi, with a look
he cannot quite configure in his mind.
It’s something new, or maybe something old,
some vestige from before, well, all of this.
Before he made them all what they became.
Before the tang of copper crossed his tongue.
Flint finishes his speech, an ancient song
of breaking daylight to descend the dark
where fog enshrouds and parrots take their plunge.
The thing expected not, it later comes
when he has taken leave to sit upon
the cliffs just as he promised he would do,
when he looks up at Flint so wreathed in sun,
with precious rubies dribbling from his gut.
Flint reaches in: “It hurt so terribly,”
he says with mouth agape and flutt’ring eyes,
“when first you thrust it in, your borrowed blade,
and split me open to the secret place.
It’s in here somewhere—oh, where has it gone?”
A sigh. A squelching. “Captain—”
“Help me, please.
John Silver, help me find it. Come and dig.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“It’s what you left.
That fullness in the ground, come hollow out
just as you hollowed me and your own skin.
It's heavy. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you see?”
He doesn’t have the veil as an excuse,
his hair tied in a knot low on his neck;
the only mask to shield him now his face,
the clay-brown visage cracked. “I see too much.”
“You never could. You never fucking saw—”
“So show me, Captain! Show me all I’ve missed!
The emptiness, the full, the G-ddamn birds!
You showed me once before; again, again.
Just one more showing, please, that’s all I need.
I’ll understand it then. I’ll—”
“Parry. Block.”
Flint draws his arm back out, all crimson-slick,
and huffs a broken caw into the air.
They’re ragged in its wake, the both of them,
with shoulders heaving, hollow, hollowed out.
Some hope in cloudless sky. His brows up-drawn.
“It’s in there?”
“Shallow-buried. We were quick.”
The unexpected thing: some footsteps near
(not near enough by half). Across the sand-
filled chasm, Madi waits, and folds her hands.
He reaches for the crutch to heft him up,
and meets her, twin poles fixed for Earth to turn
around them. Time progresses. Birds fly past.
The tide goes out and in again. He waits.
He promised he would wait and so he waits.
A day, a month, a year, they stand in place,
fulfillment of the prophecy he wrought.
No ankle suffering to take his weight
may shaken his resolve, no teetering.
But sunlight melts in time their frozen ends;
their puddles in the sand run blue and red.
Mosquitos buzz. He holds it in his throat.
“It hurts you, doesn’t it?” she says, at length.
“To be without him.”
“Not as much as you.
It's hardly being, being far from you.”
He isn’t lacking Flint, he does not say.
She’s seen the birds. She’s heard them sing his voice.
Was Flint not arguing a beat before
she took his invitation to the cliffs?
“Been far from me, I do not think you have.
Regret is complicated; I believe
you learned to say some things when they sound nice,
or just because you know that I will hear.
Emancipation, liberty, accord,
the war which we will fight in other ways?
It won’t die with my mother when she goes?
Like yours is not the hand that killed it first?
You told me once you would say anything
if it would stop the pain, before you lost
your leg and found a pain with no escape.
I understand it now: it is the pain.
The tales you tell, each one a soothing balm.
And when you hurt for missing Captain Flint,
you speak like him to mollify the bruise.
You do not know another way to mourn.
I understand it now. I see you now.”
A bird impaled upon a turning spit:
Flint called him hollow-hearted—it’s the bones,
the air in there, it tumbles in his chest.
He swallows. “So you’ve now forgiven me?”
She sets her jaw a colder thing than that.
“About your absolution, this is not.”
“Then what is it about, if I may ask?”
She forward steps, a snapping of the sky.
“I’ve gotten sick of languishing alone.”