Fine China at the Bottom of Terror Bay, Lightly Used

Above: Blue and white china plates preserved in the wreck of the HMS Terror. Photo from Parks Canada, Underwater Archaeology Team. Original article linked here.

This would be my first time publishing my poetry online, except that I already impulsively shared something else following Trump’s inauguration. It felt pertinent to the day, so I published it on the day. I might spit on it and polish it up and post here soon as well.

So, this is not my first rodeo, but it is my second! I’m excited! I am going to provide some thoughts and context below (I will be doing Pinterest mom who writes a whole damn story with the recipe blog, since this is a publication called Elena’s Take, which I made for me to talk my shit). But first, let’s get crackin’:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published310° At Sunrise (Crozier) 


Love is not enough -- 

I loved you but I could not save you, 

you say to the fine china 

at the bottom of the Arctic bay. 

I loved you but I could not save you, 

you say to all their many bones 

scarred and scattered across the cove. 



Now the ice is gone forever, never to return.

Your men have dropped what they cannot carry, 

but not before it is too late: 

tin cans, monograms, bibles and compasses. 

None can take them where they need to go.  



And you are gone, they are gone -- 

the passenger pigeons and your friend’s back right molar, 

whaling ships and the last Tasmanian tiger, gone soon, too, 

even the currents that drive the air to the heavens 



and the sea to shore. 

The ice is gone forever 

and they do not blame you anymore. 

This will be a bit rapid-fire, but I want to talk about what I’ve written here! (For some of you, if you’re experiencing the same level of Terror hyper-fixation I am, I believe some of these references might be quite obvious…).

• This poem’s title (and my general inspiration for writing it) comes from the location of a lunar impact crater named for Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier, who was the expedition’s ranking officer after Sir John Franklin’s death and likely around the time shit hit the fan.

• The “back molar” references what was used to identify James Fitzjames’s remains: the second right molar, which was removed from the jawbone for this purpose. Fitzjames was Crozier’s second and captain of Erebus following Sir John’s death. After his death, he was cannibalized, as evidenced by knife marks to the mandible from which this molar was extracted.

• The Franklin Expedition left behind or traded a lot of monogrammed cutlery in Nunavut during their attempted walkout. This perhaps makes a little more sense when you realize all cutlery on the ships was BYOB-style, with officers required to bring their own silver.

• If you want to cry, reading the Wikipedia page about the last Tasmanian tiger might do it. There’s also a little video footage of the last known individual in captivity, the endling, or last living individual of the species. There’s a controversy on the Wikipedia page right now about if the ending was named Benjamin, or if it was a female and the Benjamin business is all fake. Why not both? They should examine their biases!

• “The currents that drive the air to the heavens/and the sea to shore.” This is maybe a bit more opaque, especially if you’re not seeping in the same sense of climate doom I often am. However, I meant this to be a reference to the AMOC (or, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). This is a major ocean current climate scientists are concerned may collapse and stop flowing as the planet warms. It received some extremely rare good news in a Nature Communications article recently suggesting it might be more stable than previously thought. I am not really qualified to have an opinion on if or if not this is true, but not everyone is convinced.

• “Love is not enough” is, pretty straightforwardly, that I was watching Twin Peaks for the first time while writing this. There’s a lot of fun media to catch up on if you functionally grew up in a tower papa wouldn’t let you out of (i.e., homeschooled, raised Catholic, ect).

• It’s nice to imagine the Franklin Expedition captains might have loved their men. When we found out the real life James Fitzjames was cannibalized, I saw a lot of “holy shit, they must have been in real dire straits to eat him!” Okay, but like. Have you guys had like, a boss before? They might not have even been that hungry. (This joke polls better with folks who have not watched the Terror TV show, or looked at how handsome the real JFJ looks in his daguerreotype and fallen a bit in love).

  

  Anyway. Thanks for reading! Also, thank you to my friend Jen (@patientspider) for being my blogging and poetry buddy and providing some useful crit on my little poem. Shoutout also to my wife Katie, who is the original and most involuntary subscriber to Elena’s Take, in that she has to sit on the sofa with me and listen to all of this, if she likes it or not! >:-)

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