Henry Wise

Re: The Endurance

I imagine them hungry

with fat and matted beards,

crouching round the stove that was moving

with their moving world.

They huddled like the penguins

they hunted, and, like boys back home

playing war, made this no-place

home.

Belts cinched against their concave guts,

their faces caked and colored

by blubber smoke and soot

stood like flaws in the blearing gleam

of the sun god’s blurry light

and blended with soul-

encompassing Antarctic night.

As their lives were fiddling out

upon the brittle ice, their boat-floe, (creaking

as when the wind-bow scrapes across

the rigging), like tall pines in a storm, snapped,

lolling like yawning Death

and chilling the sap-thick sea,

the brash of mount-sized ice

forcing the crew into a closer scrum

as that armada, in its orbit north, broke

apart.

Their nucleus: a primal glow of stove and soul:

the smoldering heat of life’s frail pulse.

In their aimless drift north, they took aim

on wisps and spirits of winded hopes, pining

throughout that Southern form of summer,

and

it seemed they had spun out

of Fate’s control, like a bipolar compass,

or perhaps were too far pulled in its grasp toward

what was happening to them

then.

They faded, trailing like chum in

seas that had begun to swell

like wounds.

Their eager eyes, like eagles’, scanned

for leads and prey over gawky pack ice

meadows—drifting away without a well-fed prayer.

They watched their world as it opened

and began to thaw and flow like thoughts

of chances that once had a chance, of the folly-

lust for greatness that had drawn them

to that fluid spot. 

They must have seen it all in a kind of home-

sick reverie: the bridal-white of those god-forged floes

melting as lumps of lard on a heating stove.

Henry Wise is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Mississippi MFA program. A writer across multiple genres, his poetry has been published in Shenandoah, Radar Poetry, Clackamas, Nixes Mate Review, and elsewhere. His nonfiction and photography have appeared in Southern Cultures. His novel, Holy City, was published by Grove Atlantic in June 2024.