We were victims of the elements that day.
I do not mean rough weather,
for we were caught in irons, wrapped in an airlessness
rarely encountered in the English Channel,
alone, surrounded by the elements,
imprisoned and becalmed in dazzling emptiness.

The sun, a fire on that day unidentifiable,
no golden disc positioned for the passing hours,
rather a universal, ochred glare, ubiquitous,
without apparent source or focus,
that lighted all the air yet cast no shadows,
but burned flameless with a solid, smoke-filled luminescence
so still and heavy on the sluggish waters cold;
a sea dead flat, opaque beneath the opaque air,
with all the burnished brightness of a pewter plate,
atop a cold and lightless earth, that lay,
we knew, away below our keel,
so deep beneath as if we hovered motionless,
in floating flight upon the fathomed thermals of the sea.

And so, ‘pro tem’, our boat must be
our ‘sure and firm-set earth’
that draws the present horror from this calm
as would her canvas draw the wind to roll her hull along;
but with her deck rock steady and her flaccid, drooping sails,
that must remain a pious hope upon an empty sea;
adrift, without a cat’s paw of a wind,
beneath the voided sky crammed full of solid glare
that burns, illuminating nothing of the scene.
So smoked the sky above that molten, brassbound water,
the coasts of England and of France lay lost to view.