B makes the end of the pier, to a gangplank of sorts, wood flimsy and narrow, makeshift, which is the pier further, just lain. He lifts His head to the good glaciate ship. The MS Yachtsmann, it’s been called; most pronounce it guttural. It’s white, and hugely hulled; a ship heated from within: by its heaving stow of bodies, its own human cargo, the lives of those escaping, inescapable — immigrating, emigrating, depends who you ask and when…their bilged warmth to knife the ship, slicing it through the ice to an outermost flow, cleaving toward the open ocean, in which the waters once divided mingle, flow freely. Or else, such warmth’s from the engines rumbling the moods of every sinner, their appetites, too. Because He can’t seem to find anyone else, though, He stands out on deck alone. To board this boat bound for Polandland, over His family left sunk without wave — His people who were once as plentiful as the waters of the ocean, sandsleeping as dead as the stars whose light’s aged the sky, these however many thousands of years. And, to cross the ocean of our Columbus, you know him: a landsmann of His, landsleit removed, that crypto converso, Saint Marrano he was of the stilled, stilling depths; to travel his ocean in reverse, discovering all that’s to be discovered in the direction opposite, windopposed, the other wayfaring around — having had enough of this exploration, having been barbarized and conquered and settled and exploited enough, enslaved for too long, His life, and yet only now to give His testimony against it, through living against it: to be called to the stand, which is the mast, as a witness bound at the bow. And then, to shriek into the mouth of the wind…what would you say, B, if chanced with the choice; how living against Himself is to prophesize, if only unconsciously, what’s to come, what’s to be. He ships past the smoke clearing, a cloud lifting the clouds, and only because He’s going through the smoke, then through the clouds of the cloud and then — past the ruins of His house out on the Island to be spied land ho off starboard, off port, I don’t know but how could I, left from right from my, Liberty in her soiled robe with her burnt and waterlogged book, what surviving pages stuck fast, her Messianic sandals down below, doesn’t she ever get cold — and up above the scrapers and City Hall, her torch held heavenly and shuddering, a beacon of compromise, perhaps: not sun, not moon, but what; only pointing Him out, directing Him away, a semaphore’s banishing…brandishing that snuffready flame as if to hasten His shipping’s slog — the vessel’s stubborn stub atop and through the Hudson’s ice loosened to melt beneath its progress, toward the verge of frost, the drifty shuga, then a creaking crash to the waters finally unbound, crystalline. And beyond, distancing as far as can be sensed by wind: a lulling swell; as far out as can be imagined and, go further — amid the ocean, the true ocean, not frozen but merely thickened, slushed, an expanse of slowgoing swell: monstrous floes floating elementally in white, bergs hazard blue and serene.
Icesick soon, seablued, seagreened, tempest tost a stomach up through His throat, this vomit’s tongue, I’m feeling. He’s a Lazarus, a wretch risen only to Himself, through Himself, heaving up His resurrection; pacing the deck alone, swabbing the slabs with this tossing, hurling His throw into vacancies available: bulwarks, portholes, lifeboats topside readied to evacuate all of no one. And the ship itself seems alone, as the only vessel to the only horizon, buoyant to bob a rippling shadow, the ocean’s only; any other passenger, B thinks, must be a refugee, too, how they’re staying so low, hidden, out of mind, out of time; no manifest’s survived, to be logged with our losses, such records have been wetted to smudge…and then the crew, a thirdmate, a bosun, a captain, He gets only shades of them, flickers: scuds of mist huddling around corners, puffs gathered at the capstan, the babble of voices always a deck above or below — not a crew it feels but a force ruddering, steering, what power plotting the plod of His course through the cold. The weather, then this sickness, the hollowed throat, that and the stomach an empty purse contained in indigestible coin: a miracle, He doesn’t even showup to meals, if meals are part of His package, part of anyone’s package, if they even are. For the first week until the next Shabbos, He stays berthed in His cabin, rousing only to pace the deck late, drymouthed on water, and knotted in nerves, venous strands of them: salty ties bent to ends loose and capsized, bloodied bit bights with the remains of His frenulum and anything else sublingually left, tangled intricately, mucosal, scarstitched, hanging a fraylach from the stump of His face. The wind echoes in the bell of His mouth, then resounds in the clap of His tonsils. That Friday late, He bows over the railing, over the side. A Kiddush’s sip, why can’t I, only a sip.
