– Après Arthur Rimbaud, pace John Thompson
As I sluiced wild, homicidal channels,
The pilot just gave up: Threw up his hands…
Cos howling Red-Skins arrowed barbs—scalpels
That nailed sailors, nude, to masts: Scalped ampersands…
I couldn’t care less for the quartered crew—
Those whores portering English cotton and
Flemish grain. Red-Skinned ructions are their due…
I slam through waters, untrammeled, unmanned.
In the turmoiled, roiled tides—stormy, strident,
Wild as babes’ dreams, surge I through winter-white
Waves, while peninsulas soggy, verdant,
Unmapped, host riots—ghosts’ black screams hacking Quiet
A sea is tempests, awakenings! I—
Tempered, crafted—bob, deft in the wash—
The endless combers of Eternity—
Where dead Darkies’ eyes beam, dark lamps of ash.
Sweeter than acid’s to an assassin,
Black waves inundate—grate—my sinews-seams;
The charred seep, this spewed vomit, a wet ton,
Tore off my anchor, scattered drowned men’s frames.
My only refuge? This sea-worthy Poem—
Star-soaked, tar-rippled milk: Verse’s reverse—
Blackness blushing inky, but floating “chrome”:
Spy a philosopher’s corpse—sharks at nurse,
Dyeing the blue straits, now ruddy with Dawn,
But deliriously, as if ablaze,
Straying, spreading wine-red stains as crimson
As the pooled blood of Love’s treasonous lays…
I know lightning-veined skies, volcanic spouts,
Whirlpools, twisting eddies; I know the Night,
And Dawn that surprises doves—mourning droughts—
And I’ve seen what men muse is outside Sight.
I eye the sun, lowering, hint at spells,
Purple blotches, orange plots, scarlet figments—
The trembling death throes of Tragedy’s belles—
Quellings like floods that shudder Parliaments.
I view blue-green, Northern-Lights-enflamed snows,
Or Dusk’s light stroking soft the sea’s eyelids;
Or black, crab-like clouds suppurating crows;
Or gold-and-blue rays veiling white-bride beds.
For months, I’ve chased somersaulting tides (much
Like cattle, stampeded, trampling down reefs),
Forgetting that Saint Mary’s sun-bright touch—
Or tears—can soothe the Ocean’s panting griefs.
I moor at wild, phantasmal Floridas,
Where human panthers’ eyes mate white flora
And rainbows reach, wide as two Canadas,
To bridle, at sea’s end, glaucous fauna.
I see engulfing marshes, in ferment,
Net in reeds some Leviathan, rotting!
Think of water thrashing concrete cement
And horizons cataracts wash, clotting—
Plus icebergs, tin suns, gilded skies, pearl floods,
Splintered wrecks spiking umber-sand bottoms;
Swollen serpents, lice-pestered, crept from muds,
Writhing through sunk rigging like black, squid fumes.
I witness barnacled slaves, dorados,
In blue currents, plus grey sharks, murmuring.
Foam-flowers laurel my timbers. Tornadoes,
Ineffable, whip canvas all a-wing.
(At times, the martyr Sea, scored by crossings,
Vaunts me easy upon her sobbing bust,
Where shadows flaunt blood—poppies, tossing,
And there I bide—like a nun lost to Lust.)
Near isles, I sail, while at my gunnels, rock
Squawking quarrels—dashed-down shit of white-eyed birds,
As I drift slowly, let frail knots unlock,
While drowned slaves, backward flock, adrift, in herds.
(But I, vessel lost in a cove’s tresses—
Tempest-tossed, in ether, where no birds sang—
Would not be dredged if gnashed to carcass—
Bits salvaged where Hanseatic hands gang.)
Heaving, though encumbered by purple streams,
I block the blushed sky like a Trojan Horse,
Lichened with white mists and green-azure beams—
Those dream garnishes great poets endorse.
I run, harassed by electric, frantic
Tides shocking my maidenhead, with a glut—
In my guts—of slaves the North Atlantic
Weighs as black-gold, each an august ingot.
Waves’ blows tremble me—as if Behemoth
Is bucking me—a moth, while maelstroms groan—
Fathoms and knots distant. I cut a swath
Through blue graveyards while white cathedrals moan.
I skirt ship-scuttling archipelagos—
Isles whose flame-shot, cloud-churned skies seduce
Sailors: “Is it on such nights, when Time flows
Endless, you sleep, exiled, Time’s own refuse,
The Future’s ghost—amid mocking birds?”
True! I weep much! Dawns knife my heart! All moons
Slay dreams; the sun eats eyes. Drunk with Love’s acrid words,
My keel feels torpor; each sail swafts or swoons.
Europe’s sea’s are all piracies, unless
I sail a cold, black pond where Dusk embalms
Realms with perfume, and some boy impress
My craft where Crises pass into Calms,
And embark me now, wallowing, o waves,
In memory of slave-ships’ cotton wakes,
Displacing, with boyish glee, slaves’ toy graves—
Slit-eyed wrecks—those lees belching fat sea snakes.
[Funchal (Madeira) 18 & 19 décembre mmxv]
From Canticles I: (MMXVII), Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2017.
“Le Bateau en état d’ébriété (1870)” also appears in A Literary Harvest: Canadian Writing About Wine and Other Libations (Longbridge Books, 2025).
George Elliott Clarke is a poet and a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. His latest books are an essay collection, Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness (Véhicule Press), and Canticles III (MMXXIII) (Guernica Editions), the concluding tome of his six-volume verse-epic, Canticles.
