To the Sea
In Edinburgh, at the bar at the Caledonian,
James from Norway (Jakob back home, he says)
is working on his third Madeira, and after
showing me pictures of his late wife
and grandchildren on his phone, tells me
he has lived his life in memory of a boy
(they were both boys) he met while
they were deckhands on a Maltese-flagged
freighter, the night in Barcelona
they got drunk on aged Manzanilla
the harbormaster lifted from an export ship
and the boys stole from him. As they lay
in a soft tangle in his cabin, and the sun
set over decks, James knew he had a taste
for enduring things. They said goodbye
in September, on a dock in Lisbon.
I’ve thought about him every day
of my life. I can say that now.
As he talks, I comb the thread
of my years for one I would live
in memory of, offer a silent supplication
for those I never parted with, the decades
between James and me, his lost boy,
and all who had to leave
lifetimes to the sea.
Illinois
Signal light from a jetliner’s starboard wing,
a semaphore presage on an October night
in 1985 for me and Gary, smoking a spliff
on the roof of Rainey Hall. Everywhere
was somewhere else. We swore the world
wanted for us as floodlit combines
raked the cornfields to stover, a clearing
for what I would know in the years
that came, the sweep of the sea
off the Kenyan coast, rain-slicked
alleyways in northern cities, byways
through the Mississippi Delta, swollen
with swamp rose and spider lily.
The land is quieter here, seasons of labor
resolved in quilts of laurel green and russet gold
yawning over Champaign County. I never
called it home, though it always was,
never dreamt of returning, yet here I am,
a finale for the close of my middle years
under a harvest moon: autumn
and so on.
Subscribers can read all our publications by logging in. |
___________________________________