Sailing: An Odd Essay

Sunday Morning Evolution

You lie in this dim bedroom, sipping the cup of coffee your wife brought you, and listening to the wind in the trees and the occasional passing car.  You think, it has been a long time since you sat and listened like this and appreciated what you had. 

Your appliances are getting older.  Your sister's new iPod has twice the hard drive as the one you bought two years ago, and it's half as thick, and the screen is sharper, too.  Your netbook is first generation with the low resolution screen.  Your washer is busted so that it spins even with the lid open - a liability!  And don't even think about your car. 

You think about the rusted, clunky power tools you found in your grandfather's attic.  God, those things must have cost a fortune when he bought them, all that iron and steel, the power cords covered in a woven fabric.  (And who wove that?)  Working with them must have built a stronger generation of carpenters.  A circular saw like an anchor, with no safety features.  Ready to fall on your foot, crushing and mangling all at once.  But still here; still here, and ponderous in your hand.  With some oil and hand tools you could have had it spinning again.

Your appliances are getting older, and this is not the time to toss them for something new.  You'll make do.  And you revolt by collecting old typewriters, old refridgerators, old stoves.  Find the best examples of things that have accomplished goals, from whatever year, and make use of those.  Why have we been locked into this constant grow, discard, and remake? 

You know why.  It is because it is what your genes do with your body.  They're almost through with you already; they'll neglect you and toss you off when they're done. 

Like it or not, you have taken their example and built a world on evolution and decay.  This body may seem fine today, but tomorrow it will need for something new.  So make something new, mildly improved, repurposed.  See how it works out and then throw out the one you've got.  Genes and stockholders demand steady growth into new markets or they will sell their shares and invest elsewhere.  If your business is not growing it is dying.

Throwing your old shit in the trashheap is neature's way.  The ultimate affront to nature is to sit still and be happy with what you've got. 

Just try, just try, I dare you. 

You think about your grandmother, who spent a month in bed once, comfortable in her depression.  But she could only sit that still because she had the ocean at her window, constantly rolling, and the seagulls made calls as similar and different as snowflakes.

This Rolling Moment

"You're only as good as your last sale,"
Says the employee handbook, the district manager, the life-coach.
As if all the earlier numbers were not recorded someplace,
Analyzed, reported on, taxed.

Brain Science says
The rolling now
Is 3 seconds long.
That's our window,
Like the bouncing ball
Over the lyrics
Of our sing-along.

If we could break this rolling moment down further
One second would go into the past,
The next would unravel as we wrote it,
Leaving only that last to shape, manipulate,
Impact.

Not that I would want to break it down, I
Who long for a return to clocks
With no minute hands
And to measure time in events
Written down with words,
Rather than clicks.

All of these old sales, I am willing to let them go,
The faces of customers uncertain and eager and wary,
Desiring an argument, happy only when they know
They're getting the better of me, though I know
The opposite is true (the trick
Is to keep this secret
Off my face
Until they're gone
With a package
Bunched under
Their Arm.)

But I say, and this is my negotiation,
If I must part with those handshakes, faces, conversations,
That Managers may not have them either;
I may sell the numbers from my hours for a wage
But the dreams are mine to throw away or burn or shred
Or salvage into some secret pocket
Safe from audit.

For Wallace & Disch

        FOR WALLACE & DISCH

Why do the poets kill themselves
Amid their mounting word counts and
Their publications?  Can't they keep
A score? 
          It is a war, with teeming
Multitudes arrayed against them:
The broken homes, their natures far too
Sensitive, the ovens, guns, and nooses,
The loneliness, the disapproval
Of their mothers and their bankers,
The horrifying, self-destructive
Legacy of their profession.

Plus, now no one reads.

And yet they made it this far.  Every
Day's a victory and every
Line a mark against the void.
Void, zero.  Poet, many
Thousand, in a battle where
Success is measured by the will
To breathe and speak and stay alive.

Success should bring some pleasure, then.
So pleasure circles round to pain,
So what?  Stay on and ride it round
Again.  We need your open eyes
And hands where we can see them, making
Sense of all the shit we cannot
Stomach otherwise, and digging
Deep for all the pretty bits.

And so you find more shit.  So what?
So call a clod a crystal.  We'll
Believe, or not--but what reprieve!
You've scored another day.
                                            Death
Will erase long suffering as well
As short, so what's the rush?

On Leaving A Party

Stepping from the final train, we wonder
If it wasn't a mistake, leaving, not
Staying the night.  Now it's raining, and yes,
Our solitary work still beckons, and our privacy,
But in the rain we wonder--yes--just what
Apartment walls keep in when rain's outside
And trains no longer run.
                           These breaks, regrets--
We regret everything, it's a habit like
Skipping steps or touching your nose when
You lie, and if there's one thing I could change
About us it would be this, the regretting
(And that's all I would change)--they hit when there's
No going back, and what in simple passage
Of an evening seemed an easy choice, then
Strikes with irrevocability.

Things got crazy back there.  Heat and smoke
And wine, and jazz just good enough to stay
Behind our conversation.  Even other
Married friends were flirting.  We never threw
Such parties.  Not our scene, I guess, but done
Like that, well, now I wonder what we missed.
That painter had his eyes on you, and I
Did not mind, in my orbit of an actress
Who found (and who knows why, but I would guess
It was the unfamiliarity)
Some romance in my age, investments, double
Mortgages and, maybe, beard?  Some guests
Had taken bedrooms, and some others used
The couch, two, three, and four, and surely I
Can be forgiven if I feigned a clumsy
Inebriated stumble through a door
To see a writhing bed and wrappers on
The floor, and smell the musk and sweat and semen.
Expecting screams.  The room forgave with laughter,
Invitations.  How could it not? 
     Our coats were there.

We cross the park and walk six well-worn blocks
And halfway home I take your rain soaked hand.
Routine is what it is, things are the same,
The same nine steps up to our door, the same
Old dogs to greet us.  But, without a night
Like this we might not realize how comfortable
We are, and just how much we have to lose.

To The End Of Winter

At the ocean in winter men
	See the thinness of it all;
	Cold reminds them that
Snow--on all worlds that have snow--
Will look like this--But the rest--
The trees dormant and clinging--Branches
	Etched defiantly into space,
	Bending, swaying because they must--
	The rest could be anything, and so could they.
Waters ride their proscribed surge:
	Four feet or six (they ask the moon)
	And man sees how thin is four feet,
	The shore that spawned us all,
Between rock and space, some dirt, some air,
A tissue of complexity.

Heat beefs up the shore, grants a haze
	Of contentment and growth, disguises
	The thinness of it all with days
	Of warm and plenty.

Few come here in Winter,
Which reminds the walkers that do
That maybe they'd rather forget.
	There's a reason these are marketed
	As summer homes. Roughing it is hard to sell
	In rougher times. Sea breezes also carry
	All your heat away.