Epistles of the Abandoned Deep
A vessel, gaunt as sorrow’s skeletal hand,
Drifted through the desert of the waves—
A coffin carved by brine and bleached by time.
Here, where horizons yawned like graves unsealed,
A mariner, once christened William Hale,
Clung to the ghost of reason, thread by thread,
His mind a compass spinning without north.
Ten thousand tides had gnawed the hull to bone,
Ten thousand stars had mocked his hollow prayers,
Yet still he scrawled on parchment salt-imbibed,
Letters to a wife who wore the face of memory—
Her laughter now the echo of a shell,
Her eyes but phantoms in the fog’s embrace.
“Dearest Eleanor,” each page began,
Though every word dissolved in ocean’s breath.
The sea, that siren veiled in azure lies,
Whispered of ports where citrus perfumed dawn,
Of albatrosses threading coral skies—
Illusions spun to leash his dying hope.
He charted realms where kelp embraced the moon,
And mermaids wept in chromatics unseen,
Yet found no isle save delirium’s embrace,
No voice but wind’s unending, tuneless hymn.
One eve, when waves lay hushed as stolen vows,
He glimpsed a light—a lantern? Or a star?—
And lunged toward the phantom, arms outstretched,
Only to grasp the froth of Neptune’s jest.
The shock unmoored what reason yet remained:
He laughed a dirge, kissed the traitorous sea,
Then penned his final missive with a nail,
Etching the plank that cradled his last breath.
*“Eleanor, I’ve seen our garden’s shade—
The lilacs you nursed through the frost’s disdain—
Bloom violent in the deep’s cathedral nave.
Forgive the vows the undertow has claimed;
I loved you past the brink of drowning lungs,
And love you still where light forgets to yearn.”*
The ocean took this ode into her vault,
And sealed it with a kiss of iodine.
Centuries later, on a shoreless beach
Where dunes conspired with the listless wind,
A child’s hand, ink-stained with summer’s zeal,
Unearthed a board half-eaten by the years.
The script, a braille of anguish and salt-rust,
Spoke through the silence of the finder’s soul—
A testament to love’s mirage-like keep,
To hearts that beat as wreckage in the deep.
They say the boy stood frozen in the glare
Of understanding’s cruel, unflinching dawn,
Then cast the plank back to the ravenous surf,
A fragile act of mercy or despair.
But in that gesture, centuries collapsed:
The mariner’s hand, the child’s trembling palm,
Both brushed the phantom thread that binds all souls—
The rope of longing, frayed, yet never snapped.
Now, when the moon hangs heavy as a pearl,
And tides exhale their melancholy blue,
Some claim they hear a duel of distant cries—
A man’s hoarse psalm, a boy’s unanswered “Why?”—
While in the abyss where light and shadow wed,
Two letters drift, never to be read.
