“When he climbed up the deck ladder
that first morning, his shirt still smelled
of his mother’s wash line:
Dreft and sunshine.”
Cindy Hunter Morgan, Harborless, 2017
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I enjoy reading books set in the region of our travels. In a little souvenir shop in Grand Marais I spotted this book of poetry about the commercial shipwrecks of the Great Lakes. It’s a dour, morose little book which chronicles a period of over 100 years, beginning with the wreck of the Civil War supply ship the Pewabic in 1865 on Lake Huron and ending with the grocery supply ship the Mesquite in 1989 on Lake Superior.
There is a beauty in these stories of loss and tragedy, though much of the poetry could also feel at home on McSweeney’s as ironic satire, poking fun at the serious side of this type of melancholy rumination. I couldn’t help thinking of the comically somber poetry of Emmeline Grangerford which Huck Finn endured during his stay with the feuding clans along the Mississippi River.
Here’s another sample, this one about the sinking of the Rouse Simmons in 1912 on Lake Michigan, a ship filled with Christmas Trees:
“Those trees were meant for Chicago,
for families who waited on docks,
but they were four months late for Christmas.
The ship sunk in November.”
Melancholy masterpiece or hamfisted sentimentalia? Or, as I prefer to think of it, a satirical critique on the opportunistic tourism trade where you can view these wrecks in a glass-bottomed boat for $40.