Elegy with Oil in the Bilge

By the time we got out on the water the sun was so low, it wasn’t like water but a field of gray snow that we plowed in one endless white furrow of water as I skirted the rocks and wrecked trawlers and abandoned old jetties just under the water, while you moaned in the bow, slick with fever, whispering back to whatever the water chattered and hissed through the hull— until at last there were lights on the water and I let the old Mercury rattle and sputter its steaming gray rainbows out onto the water as we drifted, at idle, for the last time in your life, through that beloved, indifferent harbor.