The First Circumnavigation Of The Globe

Without a map or clock, and without longitude, Magellan circumnavigated the world one boat length at a time. Looking for a Westward path to the Spice Islands, the journey of a lifetime passed by slowly in green waves beneath the keel. Magellan, like most of the crews of five ships, would never return.

Outside the wind was the shape of stones.
The night was turquoise, he thought,
silky the way memory makes it,
or sadness, the shade of regret.
When longing goes on too long
it steeps itself into nothingness.

On their last night together, his mistress was a still-life,
beautiful as ever in her skin,
white like fired porcelain
aglow in the dim candlelight of her apartment.
She begged him, tell her one more time,
where was he to journey.

Magellan answered by pulling down the adorning bodice
of her blue-ribboned satin bodice
exposing each magnificent breast
so round and full they left him breathless.
He had never beheld a treasure so dear.
"Here, my sweet," then, lightly touching her right nipple,
the color of cinnamon,
"to the Moluccas. marked so on tu globus."
She closed her eyes in the ecstasy of his touch.

Actually, Magellan thought China was closer than it is.
What he made tremble under his fingertips
would become Sacramento or Reno.
The globes were barely a continent and hardly a world.
When he bent down to kiss her dark aureoles,
his lips were in the middle of the Pacific.
When she open her legs to him
it was not New Zealand he entered.
It was closer to being the Gulf of California
where even today the pounding surf
leaves a weightless white foam upon the beach.