DAMSCO Pier Punta Arenas Chile. June 2nd 2017

Letter Home from a Foreign Port

Shannon Zellerhoff
Jul 30, 2017 · 2 min read

Dear Mom,

29 May 2017. DAMSCO Pier. Punta Arenas.

A tug boat named OTWAY that I thought I ought to own.

Because it is built for serious, industrial, maritime work with a winch the size of the sun.

Another factory long liner, potentially, sadly: GLOBAL PESCA CB 3864

And one of the most gorgeous sunrises of my entire memory bleeding up from the dirt and concrete.

Painting a now marbled alto cirrus with magmatic alto cumulus, evaporating above the golden sun pushing up from England: ruby-scarlet-purple, orange, pink and a flashing fish-gilled silver.

Beyond the pier there is just a cold, soft, foot-hills-blue where laughing gulls and rippling salt water stir up a sleepy Punta Arenas.

Dear Mom, I miss you. And why? Because I have seen so many of our bird friends:

Shags, cormorants, petrels, terns, gulls, shear waters, fulmars and that glory of glories, the albatross.

A new one too that you’d love! My also new friend Gabby (who you will adore) and I call it, temporarily: the Antarctic Painted Oreo fulmar.

Its body is as black as soot with sharp, white streaks stroking its soaring wings like painted bands of chalk on coal.

I can’t wait to read to you some of my new poems, or from my journal. And to talk with you about the whales that swam under our skiff and the scientists I laughed with around the mess hall table.

I do not feel that I was ever here before on this ship, at this pier, in this small city-town in Chile; though 53 days exactly ago I was here indeed.

At night I feel that I have been here forever: a crew member on an Antarctic research vessel. And though cigarette-less now I go walking the pier; living vicariously through the fisherman’s warp my own commercial memories.

All of my adult life, so many salty trips, fresh dreams and moored realities merge like a confluence now congruent.

The fishing boats and sailing boats have juxtaposed with old, yellow bulldozers and snuffling power plants. My life is fids and bitterends now woven and spliced.

Our Third Mate, Ryan, is from Natick.

I wish to write poetry with Mhamed’s children in a tent on the edge of el Sahar with you napping beside our painted words.

Thank you for teaching me how to swim.

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