Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

I have another busy day ahead of me, so I'd like to share a poem I wrote about the Titanic. I thought it would be appropriate since The Gryphon and I visited the Titanic exhibit at the Franklin Institute recently.

This poem appeared in the now defunct Poetry New York, 8 (Winter 95/Spring 96). This is a revised edition, as it appears in my book, Picturebook of the Martyrs.

The Shoes

When divers found the Titanic
less than eighty years since the wreck
they glided tentatively
past dolls' heads, china plates, and watches,
looking for the dead. Before long they must have thought
about the orderly shoes
splayed at shoulder width throughout the hull.
And about how leather, tanned
beyond the taste of parasites,
survives longer than flesh or bone.

The grand staircase, too, was missing.
In barnacles lay all the majesty
of that gaudy balustrade:
which, survivors say, filled slowly,
green with still lit chandeliers.

In their shallow dents, the shoes
resound wearily with remembered bubbles
of percolated organs. As if the bodies,
sloping into gelid darkness, had fizzled
with the last of the electric lights. Leaving
porcelain dolls, rows of china,
and shoes.

Should it be surprising, to we who have distilled
the body into its metals and gasses,
that our skin and structure betray us
into baser elements?

Only watches to recover,
to clean and mount on memorials
for the descendants of the drowned. And neatly
nestled shoes. The thousands would remain
in the sonar of all wonder,
our synap-sounding brain.

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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