Three Boats and a Silence

1

When Otto told me about the Danish resistance smuggling  
Jews to Sweden in fishing boat holds slippery with guts

how they wouldn’t take anyone who couldn’t follow
the dagger-eyed command for silence

no one with a cough, no babies
drawing German lights toward sound 

I couldn’t get that out of my mind. 
Every time I felt a sneeze coming on

I wondered if mortal fear could silence 
the body or if I would be the one, wet 

and foul with entrails, to send
our group to Theresienstadt.

2

This boat came fast and sudden, summoned, spectral.
The night my mother died the ferryman appeared

sweeping his long oar, his back to me, pulled
by a moon I couldn’t dislodge. I heard nothing 

only saw. It came to my bed but rests 
inside me, damp. No sea so permanent. 

I still see it, fog-draped on cold nights 
when the house creaks like a wooden

oarlock, the boat always leaving
a long way from waking.

3

People are always disappearing, little
warning and too many vacant rooms.

I don’t know why I’m here, not there
or if it matters beyond our brief urgencies.

To let so many people disappear 
into a distant dark as if returning takes place

in another land, unfathomable to those
seeking rescue, wave-sloshed and shouting 

above the din, safety close as the shoals. 
I promised a third boat and it, too, has arrived 

and disappeared. You’ll have to conjure it from 
your own Lazarus-act of delivery. 

It’s easy, like lifting the door of a hold
to shine a flashlight inside.

Author of the article

Dorothy Wall is author of Identity Theory: Poems (Blue Light Press) and the essay collection, Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Southern Methodist University Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Witness, Bellevue Literary Review and Dos Passos Review. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at San Francisco State University and U.C. Berkeley, Extension and works as a writing coach.