Dead reckoning and celestial navigation

Teeth worn down by the sea mites

By the aggressive letter holders

Proclaiming a grander wisdom, from

Ptolemic webs

 

He would turn away from the stern

From the wheelhouse

To focus every second bmb ,..,.., zzcbcz bof attention

On capsizing the mutiny

That he knew would occurnv mb

Every time the weather turned sour

Every time the bellows rotted through

Every time b. ‘M ?’ Mhe lost the placementz vmM z m z5m m. M. Mc ‘tvm z m. ‘. C m. M. m.

Of fingertips on starsVxVxm. x x

To guide him around the arcane

Archipelago

That he could not see any end of

In the distance or beyond

 

Discouraged by the inert movement of sails

Through aggressive shark-filled tides

There were so many who would teeter on the brink

Of pretending he had never conquered anything

Of pretending the Patagonian monsters

Never existed

Because pelican arms could not move south

Of the equator

Without disrupting

The balance of the humors

Without drawing in the heavy bastardized sighs

Of the heathen democrats

Who would prophetize the expansion of the seas

And disregard the density of land mass elongated

From the gates of Eden

 

There was a dance

On tailored floors, with tailored strings

They say that Magellan had come from the mountains

He had

From the very forceps of a mountainous wistfulness

In northern Portugal

Places where you would never imagine

You could sit in the sacred hull of a vessel

And draw your fingertips across the

Crusted surface of the maps

That still pretended there were only

A few tiny longitudes of new breath

Separating the west from the east

 

That somehow passing through

The endless night of the Southern Hemisphere

In the Tropic of Cancer

To the Tropic of Capricorn

You would easily land on the

Whale-harpooned shores of

The Japanese peninsula

In the lands somewhere east of Java

But so close to the vehicular landmass

That spartan saviors would arise

To reassert

To reinvigorate

The Ptolemic web

 

Of Jerusalem diaspora

Of the continuity of the Mediterranean

Of the lake of the Indian Ocean

And confirm for the mountainous Magellan

That he had only a few more footsteps to follow

 

But none of this was anything more

Than simple, maniacal conjecture

Fabricating falsehood, to permeate and echo

As far as it could, within and without

To infiltrate the vessel of the mind

And prevent it from ever trampolining over barriers

 

Until the barriers lost

Their constrictive hold

And fell away

To empty out the resolution of

Dogmatic enterprise

And shifting open the windows

Slightly with askance stares into

Ripples of infiltrating light

And expose the nascent

Incantations of the truth

That there was more than just

The terrestrial planetary core

Somehow imparted into inert cosmotic membranes

With cloistered movement

Etched into planetary stone

Brackets fastened to thickly woven

Manufactured planes of sedentary space

 

Sitting silently at the stern

Sifting through transgression maps in the wheelhouse

Magellan would pat fingers to drum

His vestigial hand

On the wooden deck

While he pondered the truth of the moment

And began to understand

How the circular pathway of the earth

Would open the doorways of the mind

To truth beyond the dogmatic

Science of religious cosmography