Erebus Redux by Linda Bierds

Erebus Redux
                               
Each name long ago logged.  Ice Master.  Boatswain.
In fading ink on vellum, all:  the caulkers and purser,
the Newfoundland, Neptune, the monkey, Jacko.
The task today?  Reanimation, as up from the wreckage
divers lift toward the green light of DNA
six strands of hair on a boar-bristle brush,
and toward a forensic loupe
                                             a fingerprint in sealing wax.
Time is of the essence, the essence ice, the essence
concentrated.  Down from the mother-barge,
into the drysuits, warming-water pulsates.
Who lifted the satinwood brush?  Franklin?  Fitzjames?
And the small accordion, its bellows exhaling
two centuries of silt?  How was the final season
passed, those shrinking gaps
                                              from dawn to dusk?
Over the hammocks and sea chests,
into the tightest reaches, a melon-size camera
swims, armored, cycloptic. There is a buckle,
a blade, a glass decanter.  Who poured the wine, 
sediment to sediment?  Who stropped the blade
then cut from his coat these epaulets
and walked across the ice,
                                          shorn of hierarchy?
Why is his cabin empty, with only power’s artifact
alone on a low-slung table?  Time is of the essence,
the essence concentrated, the concentration
keeping time.  Back to the surface the syllables rise.
Quartermaster. Carpenter. Captain of the Foretop.
Who cut the threads? Who drank from the pewter cup?
Sailmaker.  Stoker.  Coxswain.  Cook.
Who thought a fingerprint in sealing wax
the wisest epitaph?  Blacksmith.  Armorer.
Captain of the Hour. Captain of the Hold.









Linda Bierds’ tenth book of poetry, The Hardy Tree, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2019.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, and Poetry. In addition to being awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Bierds has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Washington State Book Award, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, four Pushcart Prizes, the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Grace Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington in Seattle and lives on Bainbridge Island.