It's Still Life

Liturgy for the Steamer’s Hold
(a hymn for those who have known the terror of enclosure)

I. The Shudder That Will Not Stop
It enters you through the soles of your feet.
The paddle wheel’s repeating blow,
strike after strike relaying another,
water beaten into obedience
and singing its pain through the hull.

The shudder climbs your spine,
settles in your skull,
becomes the only rhythm you can think to.
After the first hour, you forget silence existed.
After the second, you forget yourself existed,
only the blow, only the shudder,
only the engine’s endless, mindless again.

II. The Chorus of Confinement
The children cry in a language of pure need,
their small lungs pressing against the walls
like trapped birds against glass.

The crew shouts in French: orders, curses,
words that might be kindness or threat,
you cannot tell which,
cannot tell anything anymore.

And the whistle —
that whistle —

a shriek that peels the skin from thought,
that announces your presence to every shore
like a confession you did not mean to make.

This is what motion costs
when fire teaches water to hurry.
This is the fringe of madness,
and it wears a human face.

III. The River’s Offering
The smell comes next:
river rot, soft and ancient,
bloated fish offering their decay
to the nostrils of the living.

It seeps into your clothing,
your hair, your skin,
so that you cannot tell
where the river ends and you begin.

You are becoming part of its slow, putrid breath,
and the thought of it
is almost worse than the smell itself.

IV. The Body’s Betrayal
Then… the stew.

Meat you cannot name,
floating in a grease that has forgotten
it was ever water.

Your stomach turns.
A small rebellion at first,
then a mutiny.

And suddenly …
cholera.

The word arrives like a boarding party,
swinging from the rigging of your fear.
You have heard what it does.
You have seen the carts that carry away the dead.
You have watched entire neighborhoods
emptied by the invisible enemy.

Every symptom you once ignored
is now a question.
Every gurgle of the gut, a verdict.
Every wave of nausea, a death sentence
written in the language of the body
you can no longer trust.

V. The Plague Year’s Echo
And those of us who remember,
those of us who lived through the time
when every cough was a terror,
every fever a farewell,
every breath a negotiation with the invisible,

we know this feeling.
We have sat in our own enclosed places,
listening to our own bodies
with the same panicked attention.

We have known the madness of too much noise,
too much fear,
too much proximity to our own mortality.

We have learned that the fringe is not a place.
It is a condition.
It is what happens
when the world becomes too much
for the self to hold.

VI. The Wisdom of the Shudder
And yet—
Brigid presses her hand to the shuddering wall
and feels, beneath the madness,
something almost like truth:

This is what it means to be alive in motion.
This is what it costs to go anywhere.
The body was not built for this.
But neither was it built for stillness.

We are creatures of the in-between,
of paddle wheels and pandemics,
of river rot and recovery,
of fear so large it becomes
the only thing we can feel.

And still we go on.
Still we breathe.
Still we arrive at the next shore
and step off
into whatever waits.

VII. For the Enclosed
Hear the shudder that will not stop.
Hear the children’s cries, the crew’s shouts,
the whistle that peels the skin from silence.

Fear the river rot and the bloated fish,
the stew that turns the stomach,
the thoughts that run relay through the mind.

Bless the body that betrays you
and the body that carries you through.

And bless those
who sit in the hold of the steamer
and feel the fringe of madness
and does not let go.

You will reach the shore.
You will breathe clean air again.
And one day,
you will tell this story
to someone who needs to hear
that terror can be survived.