Capturing the spirits of those who remain ‘Harborless’

“The captain waded through flooded passageways,

his shins pushing against water,

his feet slowed by a current that kept growing.

The last of the kerosene lamps burned out,

the matches wet, the rags wet,

and he waded as he waded rivers

on moonless nights,waiting for holes

to swallow him, wary of snags.

Still, water poured in, a fluent stream

bent on mutiny, and the captain waded 

through it, against it, fleeing in clothes so wet

they clung to him like leeches.

In darkness, he groped for the simplest thing — 

dry tinder, something to help him see

what was left of the governed world:

Pilothouse and portholes and the pale flesh

of his men, still bailing the surging 

insurgent waves. He questioned

if he ever commanded anything —

the wheel, the galley, the deck, the men,

the ever-rising uprising.”

– Cindy Hunter Morgan, Mataafa, 1905

The anchor of the Edmund Fitzgerald (photo above) has found a harbor at the Dodson Great Lakes Museum in Detroit. The ship’s bell and other artifacts are in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, Michigan. The spirits of those who went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald and hundreds of other ships that wrecked in the Great Lakes occupy the imagination of poet Cindy Hunter Morgan in her collection, Harborless (Wayne State University Press https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/).

Below the surface, in the lake bed, lie things — cast iron stoves, tea cups, crates of beer, raw materials from the surrounding landscape, and shells of shipwrecks. Through these lost things, poets like Morgan can connect with the emotion and reveal truths that are invisible to the rest of us. Those truths, like the souls of those who went down with the hundreds of shipwrecks, are present in Harborless.

As we anticipate the gales of November, a collection of poetry that commemorates several of the ships that have gone down in Great Lakes storms is inviting. But subsequent readings reveal deep imaginative power in simple imagery. Morgan, whose experience on the lakes has been limited to small craft — sailboats and kayaks — she imagines things lying at the bottom and sprits hovering above. Her poems offer an intersection between the real and the imagined, two kinds of truths, as she says, “truths that we think of historically — truth with a capital T — and a higher truth, those lives, people, men, who confront the possibility and probability of death.”

Morgan begins with the historical fact: a ship with a name sunk in one of the Great Lakes during a precise year. Familiar names like the “Carl D. Bradley,” and unfamiliar names like “Waldo,” serve as starting points for probing into imagined lives to aspects of life, living, floating to the top. “There’s something to be said for finding your way through emotion to fact,” she says, “to begin with history and these boats as a way of exploring something else about how it feels or how it might feel to confront risk, danger, possibility of death.”

Morgan was raised in Michigan and spent a lot of time camping near lakes. Her grandfather worked on shipping boats. Every summer at the family cottage she would see part of a shipwreck in the water. When she’d return the next year, a different part of the wreck was exposed. “There was great mystery and excitement in that. I think the poet’s job is to acknowledge complexity…without conclusion. Show the mind something unanswerable. A lot about those wrecks is more complicated than we sometimes think. Part of it, part of the complexity, are those lives, or those lives that I, for the most part, imagined.”

Kevin Prufer, co-curator of The Unsung Masters Series (https://kdp8106.wixsite.com/kevinprufer/unsung-masters), notes that Harborless “is a book about the transience of human experience, the vagaries of memory, and the forces that buffet all of us, often wildly and violently, during and after our lives.”  That human experience, Morgan says, is defined, in part, by the transience of life. “It’s why we get things done sometimes. We know we don’t have forever. That’s why you work on a book. It’s why you decided to drive across the country on Route 66 instead of major freeways. It’s central to how we form meaning in our lives.” 

Her interest in the subjects of Harborless was heightened by her own experience on the lakes. “I’ve felt that when I’ve been floating…this vastness, enormity, floating in this body of water goes beyond what you see…a way of making you feel small.” There is the “enormity of what precedes us and what’s ahead…”

One of the poems near the end of her book,“Nameless: Vessel Unknown, Date Unknown, Location Unknown,” finds her subject stranded, clinging “to a clump of rock cress.” As with the Unknown Soldier, this castaway is wandering an island alone, the tempest behind him. Drawn from the tradition of Robinson Crusoe, it is a memorial to those who are not only harborless, but nameless. Morgan explains: “The truth is there are boats at the bottom of our lakes that have not been identified. I wanted to recognize those boats and that experience and those people who were on those boats who have not been identified… the kind of invisibility that we associate with something when we don’t have a name for it any more. I think that it addresses the kind of castaway experience that sometimes associates with the shipwreck, too. But we don’t necessarily associate that castaway experience with wrecks on the Great Lakes.

“We think of the shipwreck as an old metaphor of life, but really it’s quite enduring and it is something that we all connect to as humans, even if we never go to sea. We understand something of the dread and the solitude that sailors experience. It is also something that we all feel as humans at some point. The experience translates very well to land. I think most of us are at some point concerned with anonymity and what it means to disappear.”

“Freezer doors swung, unbolted. Ring bologna slid off the deck.

Peas poured into the lake, plump and bloated as eyes of drowned mice.

Sliced white bread floated like lost manifests, pages torn from a logbook.

Spinach leaves bobbed like water lilies. Orange juice blended with water 

until color disappeared. A two-gallon tub of egg salad plummeted: anchor

without a chain. Potatoes sank like rocks. Steaks marbled with fat tumbled to

the bottom and settled on ledges of red sandstone streaked with white veins.

– Cindy Hunter Morgan, Mesquite, 1989