The mahogany ship

        in memory of John Manifold

How I would have the poem rest:
that European circumstance, the ship
storm-blind
and unaccompanied
beating alone by shelved cliffs, gulfs, west
under the gales' whip,
the length of her
urged at the last ashore
prow abutted on hummocks
of sift, to burrow like a burr.

And the passionate connection to begin:
thrown once for all too far up to be manned,
sea-jarrings
and the speaking charts
of sea-roads stilled, their known ports shunned to earn
a pilgrimage in sand –
the timbers weigh,
sailors run crouching, bayed
by fears, and snatch at brush
for watch-fires in her lee –

night-long at the flickering edge
of their race and language. Fires sicken. The dark
land dawns,
dunes packed by rain
mass, shoulder aside Europe. At the ridge
a face flares, turning last
from sand-bloated breakers
after water, timber, game.
Un-history cancels them. The Yangery
like the long wind hurling and raking
take them, unravel and stow
their genes between the dark thighs of the tribe.
Coast songs
and the wry cross
possess their children, the songless ship-ropes go
for nets that childbearing wives
three centuries on
re-knot for fishing – Jim Cain's
black Kitty and yellow Nellie – in their flesh.
Captain Mills notes the strain

surfacing, a legend's landfall,
even while the wind-grey panels of the hull
knives slip on
and farmers pillage
wear out of sight like the Great Expedition, founder
in wastes, and bearings fail.
The poem, consigned
and claimed, deepening in sand,
shifting, reaches among layers
to a beginning, to ends...

The long stain in the mind.

This wreck, observed many times between 1830 and 1890, lay among coastal sand-dunes near Warrnambool. It was in the tribal land of the Yangery, among whom Europeans thought they saw Caucasian alongside Aboriginal physical characteristics. The ship's remains have disappeared, though good bearings were taken on it and several expeditions have tried to locate it.
        The Portuguese Grand Expedition of 1536, led by Cristobal de Medonça, is a possible origin of the wreck. The voyage, coasting eastern Australia, was in 'illegal' longitudes (on the Spanish half of the globe) and therefore secret. K. G. McIntyre's The Secret Discovery of Australia (Picador) and J. K. Loney's pamphlet The Mahogany Ship (Marine History Publications) are my sources.