Freighter In Aspic

 Oeuf en Gelee - Egg in Aspic (with parsley)

Some of the freighters were still at anchor in lower Lake Huron Tuesday past. Some had left, ostensibly to their now ice-free destinations.
On Mothers' Day, my brother looked at a GPS display of 15 vessels at anchor using a ship tracking site. Although there was no ice in the lower lake, those freighters were held by ice as sure as larks' tongues in aspic.

I rose early Tuesday and looked out at the lake. The lights of the one vessel I could see were bright.

I remembered all the films I ever saw about ships, ghost ships, haunted ships, great ocean liners, ancient triremes.
I thought of Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci singing Skokiaan in The Impostors.
I dreamed of grim, icy enclaves where small groups huddled together against the cold and terror: John Carpenter's The Thing, Ian Holm and Adrian Lester in The Day After Tomorrow, the blog of the British Antarctic Expedition, the story of the intrepid Robert Falcon Scott and his crew...

The lights were mostly in a line following the far away boat deck, and it was a line such as Orion's Belt, and it filled me with promises of the future and threats of the future.

Mostly it reminded me of the day I was backing down the driveway on my way to the store. The moon was up early that day. I glanced at it and thought it looked large. Then  my sight zoomed in on it, and it filled the horizon, and I was on my way to the spaceport...
and I was taking a trip to the moon as if it were an everyday affair...
and freedom! I could taste the freedom! For there was the Moon and Mars beyond, Mars where the dispossessed of Earth were granted asylum:  people from Uganda, from Palestine, from Bahrain...

Now I remember the film Melancholia, and realize that the Moon fills that sky where we sit within a naked and bare wikiup awaiting the unfolding.

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