The Woman Who Married Columbus Poem by Terri Witek

The voyage was not for wives or children.
She understood this, and that it was bought with a woman's purse
which, in a poor woman, means her body.
Still, he was treasure, hands quick as knives,
children cupped to his glittering mouth
as clouds cleft to cities and ships ate clouds.
Oh, the children were wild with it- -they'd clutter the docks,
launch flotillas of sticks with changeable names.
She couldn't say how days rubbed through to fineness,
they were young, and he must ride the gold of his idea.
And the letters were gorgeous:
the world he skimmed was a rounded pear, a woman's breast,
he'd landed surely at the sweet, hard tip, the nipple,
what finally held. What could she envy?
The land would change as she had changed with his leaving,
it was only barter after all, as when coins and fruit
seem equally fraught in the delicate passage from hand to hand.
And a hard bargain he'd made. Mastic and birds instead of gold:
in this perversity, to her the land seemed wholly golden,
a full-breasted girl who offered everything but what he'd take.
Of course, lonely men will find women everywhere.
His ship was a woman, the sea a large strange one,
seamed with creatures. Perhaps even she, so long from him now,
became again a woman as they were.
At night she'd step away from sleep and the moon,
swimming in clouds like a pearl in soup,
would slip behind one cloud that pulled at it like milky skin.
Would she have gone with him then?
Having seen her body, she wasn't afraid the world was flat.
The sea was a deeper story, learned from her bucket,
how it stormed as she walked then let her tip it.
She would not have gone.
If he had misunderstood her, all in all,
she no longer clutched the bright flag of his absence.
If anything, she liked him better now, rubbed as he was.
On his last hard voyage, sleep-sick and sad,
he'd chased one gold earring all the way in
(and here it billowed and billowed from his mouth)
all the way in to Eden, a place perfectly goldless.
Dear God, what was a woman to him then?
No more to his story than he to hers.