Michael Goodfellow​

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Ship’s Glossary

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Slip hooks, lashings, boatfall, sheer off
—a sign for what to do in case of wreck,

the things it meant roped down, tarped off below.
No words for a kind of splash,

the engine room where light doesn’t reach,
the sound tires made when they pull off the ramp

or for a wind taut cord, tight enough for a gull to grip.
That the dinghy never had to be lowered,

that no one had fallen off.
How easily metal wire became a kind of land,

how the bow passed through the water like water.
How the ship lurched the length of its darkened coil.

Say that it happened. The drowning would have been vernacular
—loss, passing, accident–

nouns for what never happened clung to the chance
like mussels to a sunk hull.

The real mussels never let go.
Say that water passed above them like foil.

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