Lament of the Steamer Myron
The Miztec was built as a 3-masted schooner in 1890. She was later converted to a schooner barge and served as a consort for lumber hookers on the Great Lakes. She escaped destruction in a severe 1919 storm that sank her longtime companion, the SS Myron, only to sink on the traditional day of bad luck, Friday the 13th, 1921, with the loss of all hands. She came to rest on Lake Superior's bottom off Whitefish Point near the Myron.
Say yes to this and it all will go dark, quiet and silt-filled, gilded with the fractured exoskeletons of every small beast that laid its last upon this seabed. It is a tomb for all things.
Say yes and you may be enamored within the mighty timber fist of me. Oh Miztec, oh mine, you have drifted down and I say I always knew you would come back but stroke your pretty hull with my bare and barren lips, to remind them. They have, aimlessly and without want, pulled their haunches back to expose the little pearls beneath. My nose has fallen into its socket and for that I am sorry. My body was once grand and unflinching but wood gets buttery when left on the rock bottom of Lake Superior and I was not sure you would return. I lost myself in the weight of freshwater rot. To the rust. To the great pike and pickerel. Forgive me.
Speak to me, black-hearted west wind. Speak of the night when you ripped two lovers from their braided bonds and scattered their warm parts like one may find the other and repair them. Miztec, my love, you dropped your anchors, swung your bow into the wind, and endured the violence alone. I slipped my head under the waves and was silent after only four minutes of screaming. This was not my first time going down to the dark and the cold. I knew you would find me, raise me and bless my bloated foremast with fine oils. Set me on a course from Munising to Buffalo. Come with me, with your three spines toward the sun, and we will eat the whitefish that churn beneath us. We will sing the coal tunes that sound like 400 years of dead things dredged back into the bright air and burned, ceremonious, on our pyres.
At Salt Point, they found the living of us. All that once trickled over our skin and crittered into our pores, all that we shared, and all that was abandoned from us, washed up with unfestered linens and impractical vests of rubber and horsehair insulating their ice-sheer skin. The earth cradled them in her thawing belly and sprinkled baby’s breath around their fallow foreheads. Bury them, bury them, sink yourself into the unnamed, unmarked graves and whisper, “These are the ones that we broke like clamshells against the outcroppings. Like hullboards against the water. Like me against you.”
Fight, I say, and kiss your forehead, my wind-cracked cheeks turned Vermillion. Point yourself home, you say, and whisper mariner rhymes that echo like my boiler pulse until lake water sneaks into my veins and makes black the bright hum. Down, we say, and I inhale and you do not follow. You— miracle, Miztec, my love— will find another. You will float on warm and gilded seas. How I miss your towage. How you miss my salvage.
How the rugose and fractal, finally, embrace us both. After two years, how good it is to press my body into yours again. How quiet and how resounding. Now, the drift and trickle and silt welcome us and we hoist a shimmering bottle over our bows, to anoint us with glass, as we step through the threshold and into our newlywed home.
