HASSANMAROC
Speak to me!
Hassan smiles at empty air,
his inscriptions everywhere: HassanMaroc
in crazy patterns,
then taking another drag
Ah!
and velvet laughter following.
He and I, two foreigners on a foreign ship:
the Lotte Skou: a tramp steamer
with a crew of drunken Danes
two days out of Casablanca
and heading west;
HassanMaroc
He used to write it everywhere,
painstakingly and with a child’s silly scrawl:
HassanMaroc
on the tablecloths, on the bulkheads
once even on my shoe!
Our ship was bad luck*
our jobs worse;
of evenings we met in his cabin
and smoked hashish
it was the only way out of a nightmare.
Ah, speak!
this spoken by Hassan,
rocking with folded arms
like some fragile sea-bird
and then Arabic croons and calls.
Afterwards, he would tell
of conversations with his wife
and the Casablancan streets
that were his home.
Hassan, HassanMaroc
who bird-quick and feather-light,
who marooned on that violent hulk
of Danish jetsam
who finally and logically
his suicide
as we steamed into port
in the Canaries.
*Prior to our arrival, much of the crew had mutinied. During his rare appearances, the captain walked the decks with a loaded revolver. And the ship itself was the namesake of another ill-fated Lotte Skou which had been wrecked in a storm off the coast of Holland on June 13, 1948.
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