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.
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.
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Disclaimer
We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Patrick Phillips, whose most recent book of poems is Boy, VQR Poetry Series, 2008. Poem reprinted from the New England Review, Vol. 32, no. 2, 2011, by permission of Patrick Phillips and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.