Calenture
        an affliction of sailors in which the "victim hallucinates a
        pastoral landscape on the ocean's back, and does everything
        possible to enter it"                —Jonathan Lamb

I shouldn't like to think of them, but I do—

the men who spent their days as sailors,
pacing the decks of their ships, who sometimes would get
a certain kind of sickness that made the sea
a field. How much
the mind wants land after so much stretch
of water, wants the most land-ish thing:

a field thick with witchgrass
or blonding wheat, a meadow silent
but for the ticking of insects.

It must have felt like bliss,
that first sight of the field so wide, like a yawn
that never closes.

Some say ships would carry tufts of earth on board
to bathe those afflicted, or, when they finally reached shore,
press the sailors' faces down into the dirt.

From calentura, Spanish for fever.
Those affected had a fierce look.

I know I shouldn't like to think of those men—

but what it must have felt like—
the field green and

glinting in that sun,

the few seconds in the air
before they'd drop
into those reedy waves,

the unshorn grasses, their bare,
unsinkable sway.

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Copyright © 2019 Allison Hutchcraft All rights reserved
from Boulevard
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission