Andrew Allport

Cortez arrives. he is absolutely lost at an unknown shore. an he is enraptured (this is the nature of poetry The poem: Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is absolutely lost and he is enraptured Cortez arrives at an unknown shore he is utterly lost but he is enraptured Cortez arrives too late. the shore is absolutely barren, the men lost to starvation and rapture Cortez utters: “lost.” (this is the nature of description Cortez walks upon the beach. the ocean is as still as a map spread out on a table. (he takes a nap. All the Cortezs arrive. all the waves arrive (this is the nature of disaster

Pyke, from his Massachusetts madhouse, envisioned it as a divine craft, an Ark impervious to torpedoes. ICE is with us, ICE will win this war, he wrote Mountbatten. With a draft of one hundred and fifty feet, two million tons displacement, it could carry one hundred twin-engine planes, three thousand men, and required no steel to assemble, only water and pulp. Onboard, the men lived in cork-paneled cabins, skated down corridors to deliver urgent messages. A miracle ship, organically arisen from the element it moved in, indistinguishable from its medium, formed by Nature’s design, not the Royal Navy’s. Even her weaponry resembled God’s own: “brine guns” which would encase the enemy in ice like straw in glass, or block his harbor will a flotilla of icebergs. Churchill himself approved draining White Bay for its construction and ordered all cork immediately diverted to Canada, where a prototype built by conscientious objectors lasted through the summer disguised as a boathouse. By then Allies had landed in France, and the project was scrapped— Mountbatten threatened to lock him up again, paying no attention to a new plan for smuggling assassins into Berlin in boxes marked “Officers Only” on the grounds that the Germans were an obedient race. Love and duty stir men to action, but war makes us dream: before his suicide he shaved his beard, head. Outside, wet snow fell hard against the city, as though to clear it for another world.

i. Awake Each entry consisting of the statements I am awake or I am conscious entered every few minutes: 2:10 p.m.: this time properly awake. 2:14 p.m.: this time finally awake. 2:35 p.m.: this time completely awake. At 9:40 p.m.I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims. This in turn was crossed out, followed by: I was fully conscious at 10:35 p.m., and awake for the first time in many, many weeks. This in turn was cancelled out by the next entry. ii. Passport How large it grew, that first kiss, until I could board it each night, a raft drifting out into the quiet lake. After twenty years the great amnesiac HM never recognized his doctor, and after lunch gladly ate another: Time for lunch, they would tell him again. You must be starving. God, I am starving. Without a body, collection cannot precede recollection: recollect a tongue, that skilled swirl of its quick tip, a mouthful of familiars: smoke, strawberry candy. Memory in the web between dumbstruck and dura: dump and dune, duplicates. What kind of game is this? I’m no longer a boy, HM would say to his reflection, the surprise on his face genuine. What kind of game is this? The mirror a passport like any other, its picture out of time, a foreign shock of untamed hair even the photographer declared beautiful then. Then: the word smiles like a stranger on your first day at school, sitting on stone steps, worn with use. iii. Taxonomy “Red but not bird comes to mind.” Only the kingdom of living names was missing there—bank, flagstone, sofa remained, but not the blur at the feeder, the undersea creature on the card— it’s a danger, a killer swimmer, they coaxed him—it’s called a (waiting for the word to stir from its depth; how could he forget the ones who dressed, fed, taught him word by word the order of the world? What noise does that loss make?) (They looked suspiciously like his parents, he thought: strangers posing unanswerable questions)— “It has no name, it has no need.”

We called off the search, and the weary climbed down from the glacier with their dogs exhausted in the spring sun too tired to eat the ice in their paws. We had called his name, mostly for show, a ritual that kept us moving: in the high bowls, their stunted pines predating the flood, in the steep ravines sliding loose with scree, loudly at first, then speaking it to each other then spelling it out on forms required by law. It is a form of praying, he claimed, to walk out to the very edge of your life. Every time the reply comes clear as a stone at our thin crowns. It misses almost every time, humming as it goes.