Salt - Susan Collier Lamont

[Larry Robinson]

Salt


for my 5th great-grandmother, buried at sea in 1755, first name unknown, wife of Michael Clifford


I imagine cormorants, black against rinsed sky, fog
a second skin, hands on the ship’s slick rail to steady
yourself against the tide that day you fled. I imagine

your leave-taking, rough unpainted door, hedgerow
of hawthorn in bud, blue song-thrush eggs safe in their nest,
left behind with your idle loom. Ulster’s kings of commerce

pressed your life to the margins, no longer trade in linen, and you
can only imagine freedom and plenty somewhere away from home.
A rough migration along the curve of the earth leaves the Irish Sea behind,

your ears filled with wind, heaven just past the horizon, out of your reach.
I imagine ingots of light igniting the waves as smallpox ignites
your cheeks, your fevered dreams of home, the hawthorn buds open,

their honeyed scent, a thrush’s fluting song, while on this ship,
three children, John, Jacob, Sarah, clutch your homespun skirt,
bereft. I imagine a life, a death. Your memory a whisper,

nameless. No shroud save your linen apron. No Momento mori
on lichened stone. The salt of fever and tears joins all the unnamed
beneath the waves, your life just so much salt in the wound of the world.

Elizabeth Painter Clifford   Presenté


	- Susan Collier Lamont
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