I.  A tanker,  fresh from the Gulf, passes by under tug assist .  It slips ghostlike through the sea smoke and flows of ice astern of us in the early morning, wearing a beard of ice three-foot-thick that trails all the way amidship. The hull looks freezer burned, painted with a fuzz of frost.   The ship sails on silently upriver.

II.  On deck, night, and the salt has lost its efficacy in the extreme cold.  The slag steams as it gushes into the holds.  To avoid slipping he baby-steps up and down the deck and stops to watch hatch 15 fill.  The only exposed skin is his nose and a millimeter of wrist on each arm where it feels like the skin is coming unpeeled in the deep freeze.  Beside his heavy, booted feet the words FUCK YOU are writ large in the downy snow.

III.  He and the bosun seek shelter in the small control room up forward where the mate is monitoring ballast in the dull glow of the computer screen.  They sit in the dim and the drowsy heat and shed their bulky layers.  The mate is playing music from his phone. It blasts through a Bluetooth speaker.  The mate dips a cursory toe in the first chorus of a familiar song.  The bosun follows and then he does too.  ‘You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you…’  And then they all wade in and commit themselves fully.  “You’re so vain (you’re so vain) I bet you think this song is about you.  Don’t you?  Don’t you?“  Out on deck cargo flows from the load-rig and snow continues to fall.

IV.  He dreams the soft touch of women he has never met and wakes to the heatful thrum of his sleeping self and the condensation on his cabin window frozen into dioramas of dendritic lines; feathered brushstrokes, filaments of fine vane.  Every one its own constellation of infinitesimal prisms projecting uncommon angles of light.  A different one greets him each morning.