Jan,
Here is my basic reading of the poem, along with some notes about things I enjoyed and some sticking points.
The first stanza establishes the speaker as ‘that phantom ship’ which is described as wholly directed by the surf. He is surrounded by a sea where reality is absent save for intimations; and where the known is defined by the unknowable—‘knowledge banked without meaning.’ The last three lines of the stanza extends the metaphor to the artist’s enterprise. The artist can neither direct nor predict the form his drawings will take, the crow-quill of creation being out of his control and wholly centered in the now.
You strike a mostly effective balance between two types of diction, Latinate and Anglo Saxon; the one abstract and philosophical, the other tangible and direct. However, I think in the case of ‘intimations of facticity’ you have one too many latinisms. It would involve me better as a reader if the cold facticity were couched by more direct terms, like traces or shadows.
In the second stanza, I am unsure how 'the sins of the father' factor into the governing metaphor. I also agree with Glenn about—‘A disquiet exercised inside futility.’ I fear it resembles one of those
hollow technical pirouettes that Conquest decried, an epithet where disproportionately little sense is found beneath the heap of verbiage. I do like the lines that follow, however, particularly the ‘making sea,’ reinforcing the sea as being at the helm.
As for the third stanza, I like the descriptive ‘heave, pitch, roll and yaw’; and the reflection that the speaker has no mastery over the ‘surge and sway,’ much less the canvas. I also enjoy the canvas hanging limp like an evening kill, a vivid and apt image.
The final stanza defines the destination of the voyage where land stands for death. At this point, the speaker concludes that he has but two choices left: either to reclaim self-direction by means of self-immolation or continue a passive object on the surf-directed course. The jump to this conclusion struck me as a bit unnatural and melodramatic; I did not feel convinced by it. Despite these nits I did enjoy this poem overall. I took the liberty of isolating the parts that worked for me, with two suggestions slipped in, for what it’s worth.
Doldrummed, a phantom ship heels,
in latitudes where horses drown.
It dips into a mirrored, silent sea
where nothing exists or reflects
other than shadows of facticity.
I am that phantom without traction.
My holds are swollen with ephemera,
knowledge banked without meaning.
Here, a crow-quill has inked a wake
with nothing plotted beyond the now.
Is any course taken then mine to make?
How much of me was made by me,
how much ordained by the weft of stars?
How much of my existence is reality?
Unhinged, the winds rise and flail,
we’re underway through a making sea.
Foul-hulled, sullen in surge and sway,
heavy, we heave, pitch, roll and yaw.
Centered in this radial violence,
I can hold, but in this there is no mastery;
there is only impending consequence.
I ask but there is no answer from the helm
I move at the whim of wind and water,
yet my canvas will not muscle and fill.
It hangs salt-rimed, unbellied, limp,
like dead on the fence of an evening kill.