Elegy in an Abandoned Boatyard

... mindful of the unhonored dead —Thomas Gray Here they stood, whom the Kecoughtan first believed gods from another world, one pair of longjohns each, bad-yellow, knotted with lice, the godless, bandy-legged runts with ear bit off, or eye gouged, who killed and prayed over whatever flew, squatted, or swam. In huts hacked from mulberry, pine, and swamp cyprus, they huddled ripe as hounds. At cockcrow scratched, shuffled marsh paths, took skiffs and ferried to dead-rise scows, twenty-footers dutifully designed and of right draft for oysters, crabs, and croakers. They were seaworthy. According to diaries hand-scrawled, and terse court records, our ancestors: barbarous, habitual, Virginians. Some would not sail, came ashore, walked on the land, kept faces clenched, lay seed and family, moved often, and are gone. Of them this harbor says nothing. Of the sea’s workmen, not much, no brass plate of honor, no monument in the square, no square, merely the wreckage of a place. But they stood— proud, black and white, surly in mist at the hovel of the boatwright, arm pointed: Build me one like that yonder! Meaning the gray hull I see across a cove, bottom up, canting, nameless now as the hard, long arm, daddy’s or granddaddy’s, that points, but known to the one said to crush clams in his palms, thus got paid, always, who built the derelicts, and who, barring feud, took stick in hand here, made that grave gouged line of a keel, then his broad brow lifted seaward, in silence, sometimes summoning a shape in memory, and it hove up, and was changed some, they whined, but God knows all they wanted, all he made for them was to be a little unlike the drab hulls of the dead ones, but not too much. Like that one yonder! This was the image he gave them to dream of change, tomorrow only a guess, the sea’s story their life-stink and bow-slam and stillness, and they saw how the fair ones grew, quick riddle-riders our fathers feared, schools that gave us a message sewn on chest, Bible, slate, and this worm-holed future entered blindly as I now have entered his place, feeling for log-char, back-flung gates of light, and the builder. Like that one ... the lies begin, each inventing why he should rise up, he should hack out the joy they dream, his pitch boiled, black as mud seaming their legs. Suddenly, I see and take up a cap left as worthless on a stump, its stained round fitting my head like water. Merely to wait where the builder heaved shards and chips and abortive clots to the tide’s tongue-lap is to feel the unconceived shape pulse down his arm, into fingers that took up that stick to let loose the ingathered wilderness of dreams: loon, crow, osprey, gull, the man who cannot believe what he sees, but still sees it. An immense shadow making over water. Stick in hand, eyes squint. And there it is, the wind cradling of an Eagle, wing-sails, unfurled, bow-chopping white water head on, a creature now there, now gone. A man, I have to hold my face up, study how air heats, builds a rising push until the high circle of sight skids out everywhere. Dreaming change, I understand, almost, the problem: is he not harnessed, himself, this light flyer, this father designed to sail like a small god, to screech down upon pine-huddled, hungry chicks he must send off with his lethal, air-buoyed shape? Nothing in him asks what is over the wave-edge where our brothers float and sink, lovely shadows, by the millions. Putting my back to the sea-worn trunk they have left me, I pull the stick through the dirt, and remember the long line, man-weight in it, and dark-buoyed. It grows with freckling light, with the answering of birds crying out the only speech we all have above our unfinished country that looms still in the soul, that would bear us hence, out of the water that beats in, out of the water that bore us all here.