Craig Brandis

A human heart pumps enough blood
over the course of a lifetime to fill a super tanker.

Say this heaving ship full of blood
hits a shoal and spills its precious cargo into the sea.

All the proud, anxious, willful hours
infused in an entire liquid lifetime
mix with the dreams of sea urchins
and manta rays become blinded by love incarnadine.

Above the waves a lighthouse casts it’s watery beam
on a little white clapboard Catholic church near the bay.

A priest bends over with an aching back to tie his shoes,
wondering–out of nowhere– if God gave sea creatures
a mining claim on the un-lived fossil bed lives of his believers.

“Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has over-runningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them…you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish, like a lightening strike in a tree.”  — Moby Dick

No thing in the flesh
burns more searingly
than this hatred.

It is a hotter fire,
a pain more cutting,
a sorrow more eviscerating–
this diamond pure
rancor and loathing.

And yet –and yet–
it can bring a Fletcher Christian
and his crew out of the maw
o Pitcairn island.

It seems nothing good
in this world
comes without alloy.