Today's poem is by Joan Wickersham

Shipworm (Teredo navalis)
       

Your life is tunnels. You burrow in,
eat your way home, eliminate, fornicate,
all in the same wet den. You're a fraternity boy
who never leaves the house,
eating, drinking, shitting, releasing sperm.
When that gets boring, you turn female,
filling the tunnel inside you with sperm you suck
from the tunnel you live in. Pure orgy.
In the end the place is trashed —
holes in the walls, the floors, the ceiling.
Are you happy now? Don't you just want more?
Or maybe what looks like decadence
is just plain toil. Those frenzied wooden Gomorrahs
are really testaments to your efficiency —
silos full of grain, hives full of honey,
stores and warehouses piled high with manufactured goods.
If holes are your product, then your negatives are positives.
You build by subtraction, add by taking away.
Every emptiness is an achievement.
Your name shows up in every Vasa story,
both names: "Shipworm (Teredo navalis),"
the Linnaean taxonomic like a graduate degree
trailing your name so that we will take you seriously.
Who wouldn't, after seeing photographs
of what you can do to a waterlogged piece of timber
in sixteen weeks? What would Vasa have looked like
after three hundred years of your devoted attention?
You're the cockroach that didn't eat Cincinnati,
the typhoon that swerved before it hit the island.
What kept you away was salt. You need it, love it, crave it.
Without it there's nothing to talk about, nothing to eat,
nothing to drink, nowhere to live. The Baltic's too bland.
Plenty of other shipwrecks in other oceans,
seasoned just the way you like them.
As a child I learned of death and worms together,
some kid on a bicycle who rode to my house
and sang the song about the hearse and the worms
that would play pinochle on my snout.
I'd never heard of pinochle, but I got the idea.
We were meat. We were helpless. My life,
the eternal day-by-dayness of it, was little and would end.
Everything — the sparkles in the driveway,
the taste of the washcloth, the quiver of the soft-boiled egg,
the strange odor of my parents' pillows, my left thumb
with its bulge from sucking — would go.
Everything I'd thought I owned was rented.
My parents' "We'll take care of you"s
were true as far as they went,
but they didn't go all the way.
There was another world my parents hadn't mentioned.
Maybe they didn't know? I was afraid to tell them or to ask.
The kid on the bicycle knew. The song knew.
There were worms and we were helpless.
Always. All of us. No exceptions.
You, shipworm, Teredo navalis, less than a tenth of an inch
from end to end, blind and mindless,
relentlessly debauched or relentlessly industrious —
you eat what you want and you didn't eat this ship.
You didn't want meat without salt.
Creation myths need snakes, some devils, a tempter.
A resurrection story turns on a worm,
a master of corruption who miraculously fails to corrupt.
How fitting that you — you connoisseur of,
you maker of, you lover of holes,
you great creator of nothing —
should fill this story with your absence.

Copyright © 2025 Joan Wickersham All rights reserved
from No Ship Sets Out to Be A Shipwreck
Eastover Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission