DEAD RECKONING

by Mark Hennessy

I dreamt of you in the bottom of the boat,
my head on McNeish's knee.
You ware a shirt made from an old deck chair --
bands of pale sky blue.

Everything here is so close to me -
these other men, the sides and bottom of the boat,
the cold thirst, the right and now
of right now.

I have not dreamt of land for seventeen months,
but I turn the chance of it over and over in my gut,
like a needle of iron floating in a snuff-tin,
like a mother baleen trying to tender
her still calf careful from the deep.

Four readings in eight hundred miles,
in this, the Crozet Basin,
without a horizon or a sun to see,
I take them for the men.

The sextant that pilots my hand in my gut asleep.
I ask it to dream of South Georgia.