Canary-yellow sloop with a Bermuda rig

Off Melville Island on the placid green of the Timor Sea,
where the giant barramundi
glide beneath the surface and the Spanish mackerel swarm,
that yellow sloop passes with its wandering spirits,
stirring the rock cod from their drowse.

Bound North by Northeast into deeper water,
this untidy rover sails on a reckless journey,
one exploring risky archipelagoes
and realms of Third World disorder,
those marked on the charts by chaos and misery.

In an orange sarong the vain young captain
dances across the fine teak deck,
a tall and shining being in the hazy light,
his confident gaze fixed on a bikinied crew barely out of their teens,
amateurs as slender as naiads and unaware of the abyss:

He is someone’s wayward son, but how his ship disappears will elicit
little sympathy when the news breaks, perhaps taken by pirates,
or swallowed in a fog over the Java Trench, where unmanned drones
circle high above the clouds with that sky-floater, the sea-eagle,
bearing witness to all such vanities, and the agonies of the lost.