and each night we slept over their bones.....

                            
                

Jan Hendrycks confesses that one day he had been called by Jeronimus into his tent and that he gave him to know that at night time he must help him with the murder of the Predikant's family. At night, Zeevonk has called outside Wiebrecht Clausen, a young girl, whom Jan Hendrycks stabbed with a dagger, and inside, all people - the mother with her six children - had their heads battered in with axes . . .

He said, certainly, I have a knife. So without any objection, Andreas has gone to Myken Soers who was heavily pregnant and threw her underfoot and cut her throat . . . 

and each night we slept over their bones..... all three of us tight together in a creaky iron framed bed.

Extract from Pelsaert's
The Disastrous Voyage of the Ship Batavia,
first published in 1647

a place to rest ones head

He carried Ulysses to the other side of the world and back again, unread.

He starts twice, turning a few pages only before standstill; a mirror, a bowl, a razor, no more. Each eve thereafter he places the book carefully under his head like a japanese sleeping block, to lull in the forest waiting for sleep, embalmed in the elsewhere night. Night belonging in a book, somewhere in a book he once read, in the many nights of books. With hands clasped to chest, tighter than imagined, he hunts frayed words with which to render the darkness familiar.

Something to splice the creaking ship's mast to the poplar's hawsering bowed note once more. Something to tether the screeching thunderbird when it came, talons raking a brimstone sea for whale and sailor alike, as to bind it tightly in the wind spinning off the mountain top. Wind he imagines only from deep under the kelp through halibut eyes, as current line whirlpools, churning the sea far above. Later he hears siberian vagabonds pass bye the bye, whorling iced expletives at painted shutters and doors as they go. Swaying left, right, drunk and belligerent, they stop suddenly. Nearby ? As if puzzled for a moment by a lilting song. A woman's? A woman who trails a sighing finger through the canopy and with a gossiping whisper sends them carousing away down the valley, to the old people Tseax buried with fire... those who wait for news of the sea each night....

quieter, then quieter still...

The ship returns to transcribing the tide. He hears a rat? or bigger? and it's gleeful companion bickering once more over gruel or seed... and when sleep finally comes it comes as a wordless tempest.

  

boats of alert bay

a picture for sontag

(Click for full size)

when it leaves...

Later


much later, he imagines it somewhat like the ebbing of a high tide.


The exact point of it's turn indiscernible under a fecund moon. When the fish suddenly stop biting the fisherman, so intent on the next bite, only realises it is already departing when he next pulls his hook to the surface and finds it not missing bait as he thought, but ignored and untouched. More so, that first clear sign is disbelieved as an aberration and the line is swiftly run out once more and fingered optimistically, patiently 


waiting until


finally it is only the tardy arrival of the grotesque.... 


eyeless pilchards festooned with sea lice, guts distending and the unbecoming writhe of a Port Jackson shark slapping against the gunnel, fantastical and disturbing in the moonlight, which irrefutably signals the now vast emptiness of the sea. Removing the hook from deep in the fish's impossibly white throat, recognition of some shared futile and primordial febrility gnaws deeply at the fisherman's gut... and he sits unblinking, barrenly attempting to reconstruct the point where time and tide stopped and 


waited


before slipping away unseen.

Klondike River

All Yukon belong to my papas. All Klondike belong my people. Country now all mine. Long time all mine. Hills all mine; caribou all mine; moose all mine; rabbits all mine; gold all mine.

White man come and take all my gold. Take millions, take more hundreds fifty millions, and blow ‘em in Seattle. Now Moosehide Injun want Christmas. Game is gone. White man kills all moose and caribou near Dawson, which is owned by Moosehide. Injun everywhere have own hunting grounds. Moosehides hunt up Klondike, up Sixtymile, up Twentymile, but game is all gone. White man kill all.

Chief Isaac quoted in Dawson Daily News, 15 Dec. 1911.

today i thought of you

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