Shipwreck and Ark Symbol in Call Us What We Carry

What Are the Shipwreck and Ark?

In Call Us What We Carry, shipwreck and ark do not remain separate images. The speaker presents ruin and preservation as two faces of a single nautical pattern. A shipwreck is literal catastrophe—a broken whaling vessel, a slave ship stowed with suffering, the disorientation after collective trauma. An ark is a crafted container that holds what must survive: Noah’s biblical vessel, the Torah chest in a synagogue, the book itself as a “message in a bottle” (Chapter 2). Throughout the collection, wreckage becomes the raw material for an ark built of language. The poems trace how testimony transforms bare disaster into a structure that can carry memory forward.

Recurring Appearances of the Nautical Motif

The nautical motif surfaces in several key poems and thematic clusters.

Ship’s Manifest (Chapter 2)

Gorman frames the entire book as a maritime artifact. The poet describes it as “a message in a bottle” and “a wake,” then calls it “an ark articulated.” The speaker casts the collection onto uncertain waters, insisting that a record is a reckoning. The epigraph from Anne Carson establishes the link between survival and the duty to carry experience into a shape, and the manifesto poem translates that into the ark-image.

What We Carry (Chapter 71)

This poem offers the most direct meditation on the ark. It opens with children cupping earth in the “boat of our palms,” then moves to a definition of ark drawn from Latin arca (chest) and arcere (to close up or contain). A second definition—the ark as the place for Torah scrolls in a synagogue—arrives immediately afterward. The speaker then declares, “We put words in the ark. / Where else to put them.” The ark becomes language itself. Later, the poem links the days that “walk two by two,” pairing past and present, and states: “Language is an ark. / Yes, / Language is an art, / An articulate artifact. / Language is a life craft. / Yes, / Language is a life raft.” The sequence shows the symbol’s evolution from a mere container to an active craft that keeps people afloat.

Another Nautical (Chapter 17)

Here the poet examines the suffix -ship, unrelated to the vessel but meaning “quality, condition, skill, office,” and traces it to Old English scieppan, “to shape, create, form, destine.” The poem turns the suffix into a verb: “To ship… means to imagine or place as a pair, to push two persons or things together.” The linguistic play reframes shipwreck not only as destruction but as a way of forming relationships. The same chapter weaves in Noah’s animals “two by two” and describes people as “mammals marked to flood / This day throbbing into tomorrow.” The Toni Morrison epigraph—“All water has a perfect memory”—links the sea to remembrance, making the ark a container of water’s memory.

Call Us (Chapter 16)

In this brief poem, the human body becomes a vessel. The speaker notes that “over half of our bodies / Are not our own,” with “non‑human cells” making each person “a boat of a being.” The poem ends, “We are not me— / We are we. / Call us / What we carry.” The physical body functions as a living ark for a microbiome, a metaphor that expands to the collective “we” that carries history, grief, and hope.

The Whaling Ship Essex (Chapter 15)

Gorman references the historical wreck of the Essex, an American whaler attacked by a sperm whale in 1820. Only eight of the twenty crew survived after months adrift. The poem opens with the stark fact and an epigraph from Ocean Vuong: “I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.” The Essex becomes a literal wreck that inspired Moby-Dick, modeling how catastrophe feeds creation. The wreckage itself, once legible, is testimony.

The Slave Ship (Chapter 49)

The erasure poem “_ _ _ _ R I P _ _ _ _ _ _ a _ _ _ _ _ Ship” incorporates the 1789 broadside Description of a Slave Ship. The visual poem alludes to the packed hold of enslaved Africans, a horrifying vessel of dehumanization. By placing this image inside the collection, Gorman transforms the slave ship into a site of witness. The wreck of human dignity must be carried, not discarded, so that the record becomes a form of atonement.

The Fellowship (Chapter 48)

A letter from Ida B. Wells-Barnett to President Woodrow Wilson appears under the heading “The Ship.” Wells-Barnett protests General Ballou’s bulletin that urged Black soldiers to avoid public places. The “ship” here could be read as the ship of state, the fellowship of the league, or even the vessel of the letter itself. The inclusion recontextualizes the nautical symbol as a vehicle for political testimony and survival against racial oppression.

Cordage, or Atonement (Chapter 23)

This longer poem deploys whale imagery and the word atone—etymologically “at one.” The speaker cries, “What a marvelous wreck are we,” blending ruin with wonder. The shipwreck here is personal and collective, but the poem ends with a resolve: “Let us take back our lives.” The wreck is not the final word; atonement is possible through holding near “who we hold dear.”

How the Symbol’s Meaning Evolves

The symbol moves through three overlapping phases.

1. Wreck as testimony. The Essex, the slave ship, and the disorientation after crisis are pieces of a wreck that must be described. The opening manifesto calls the book a wake and a reckoning. The wreck is the “terrible light” that the poet preserves. This phase frames wreckage as the necessary material for record.

2. Ark as language and art. The poems repeatedly turn wreckage into an ark through words. In “What We Carry,” language is an ark, an art, a life raft. In “Another Nautical,” the suffix -ship becomes a verb that creates relationships, and “words… are a type of washing.” The ark is not made of wood but of poems, letters, and testimony. The book itself is “meant to be lived in,” like a ship.

3. Ark as collective carrying. The final evolution merges the ark with the communal body. “Call Us” recasts the human as a boat of beings, a microbiome that is essentially “we.” The ark is no longer external; it is the collective speaker’s shared responsibility. The title poem “What We Carry” closes with, “We walk into tomorrow, / Carrying nothing / But the world.” The ark has become the act of bearing one another.

Connections to Characters and Themes

The shipwreck-ark symbol intertwines with the book’s key characters and thematic threads.

• The collective speaker embodies the ark. The “we” that writes, speaks, and remembers is itself the vessel. The poems in the first‑person plural transform personal grief into a shared carrying. The collective speaker becomes the human ark.

• Ida B. Wells-Barnett surfaces in “The Fellowship” with a letter that is both a ship of protest and a relic of survival. Her testimony underscores the theme of resilience and healing. The ship carries the demand for civil rights across time.

• The lost and the dead are the cargo of this ark. The collection repeatedly names historical and ancestral figures. The slave ship broadside, the Essex crew, and unnamed ghosts populate the vessel. The poem refuses to let them vanish. They become part of the “record,” linking to collective memory and erasure.

• The Donohue family and other specific losses in the collection magnify the personal cost of public catastrophes. The speaker’s private grief in poems like “Rosary” is carried by the larger ark of the book, bridging to grief and trauma.

The theme of unity and fellowship receives its most compact nautical expression in “Another Nautical”: “There truly is a unity / That requires no ‘they’ / For us to be threatened by.” The suffix ‑ship as a shaping force models how relationships craft the vessel that holds people together. The ark is social, not individual.

The movement from wreck to ark also anchors hope and transformation. Even the brutal material of the slave ship and the Essex crisis is not discarded. The speaker insists that “Loss is the cost of loving,” but the ark carries that loss forward into a future that, while not unscathed, is still possible.

Why the Pairing of Shipwreck and Ark Matters

Gorman never separates the wreck from the vessel. The same sea that destroys also bears up. The epigraph’s idea of asking one who has survived—and the survivor’s obligation to “carry that experience… or turn it into an autonomous object”—provides the logic. Shipwreck is the event that demands a container. The ark is the act of remembering, shaping, and transmitting. The title’s imperative, Call Us What We Carry, renames people by what they hold and what holds them. The dual nautical symbol makes that carrying tangible.

The book refuses to offer an ark without first acknowledging the wreck. The Essex poem does not skip to the survivors’ rescue; it lists the dead and the months adrift. The slave‑ship fragment does not resolve into easy redemption; it remains a visual scar. Only after reckoning with the hull of history can the speaker claim, “We have decided to / Remember.” The ark is built from splinters.

Study Questions

1. How does the poem “Another Nautical” use the suffix ‑ship to alter the meaning of shipwreck?
   The poem decouples the suffix from the vessel, tracing it to a root meaning “to shape, create, form, destine.” By turning ‑ship into a verb that means “to imagine or place as a pair,” the piece transforms shipwreck from pure destruction into a potential for forming relationships. The linguistic shift suggests that what appears wrecked can be reshaped into connection, and words themselves act as the shaping force.

2. In “What We Carry,” the speaker states, “Language is an ark. / Yes, / Language is a life raft.” What evidence earlier in the collection supports that claim?
   “Ship’s Manifest” calls the book “an ark articulated” and “a message in a bottle,” linking language to a vessel that preserves testimony. The Essex poem uses the Vuong epigraph to treat the wreck’s pieces as “legible,” turning trauma into text. Throughout the collection, poems function as containers for memory—letters, protest documents, and erasure poems all act as small arks.

3. Why does Gorman include the 1789 broadside of a slave ship among the nautical images?
   The slave‑ship image represents a historical wreck of human dignity and a failure of humanity. By framing it within a collection that builds an ark of language, the poet refuses to let the atrocity be forgotten. The terrible light of that history must be carried. The broadside becomes part of the record, turning a document of horror into a site of witness and commemoration, connected to the theme of collective memory and erasure.

4. What does the line “What a marvelous wreck are we” from “Cordage, or Atonement” reveal about the relationship between catastrophe and survival in the collection?
   The oxymoron “marvelous wreck” captures the tension at the heart of the symbol. The wreck is not denied—it is ruin, loss, and suffering—but it is also marvelous because it holds the capacity for atonement and transformation. The poem traces the etymology of “atone” to “at one,” suggesting that reckoning with wreckage can create harmony. The line affirms that the collective speaker endures not despite being a wreck but because survival itself reshapes the wreck into something that can carry meaning.

For further reading on how these symbols support the book’s vision, explore the full themes of Call Us What We Carry or return to the book overview.