So I Watch Ships

So? I watch ships.

I do it alone, not from shame, but to be sane.

Predictable gliding sideways hotels 

and malls and wheelless truck haulers,

Guardians of the watery plains, 

Observers of the horizon and expanse and depth -

And the heights, too;

Waving at us, sounding a salute for us, feeding and moving us.

20 thousand seven hundred sixty-three tons to transport

With effortless glide.

The piling water on the bulbous bow skipping and jumping, 

those seaway dolphins playing along the copper hulls.

And our 24 feet gives all it can 

as we relax with friends lapping up the spray and rusty sun.

The insurmountable power of the silent deck

Bound only by its own Herculean capacity.

Then it passes another on Ontario, in the canal, 

Waiting turns at the locks like 

ebullient children lined up for the thrill ride. 

 

Waves run up on her, or tap tap against her sides. 

She invariably survives,

The stoic sorceress of unrelenting drive.

 

On shore, waves beach themselves, 

As do deadlines and pretended competencies 

and unmeetable obligations,

and being soul deprived through avaricious bounty.

And the shipmates can leave at any time,

since no rail or distance or depths compel their remaining.

The path of a landed journey is not filed.

Striped orange horses thwart most preparations

As does anxiety and selfishness, within and without.

 

But on the Seaway, the port is prepared and waiting.

Barry Freed has kept the dolphins’ paths clean and lively.  

Teeming, teaming, gleaming, steaming with our needs and wants.

So, I watch ships.

Wooded Waves

Just a jot about the end of things for the 
marginal mourner on this bier of rest that was laid in place for this 
wary wayfarer, as an offering of pained fitful rest for this one, 
too.
And it gave pain to his fatted raiment.
Hard wood offering a consolation and rest for none now,
But much for later.
Later is sooner than the age of these unyielding planks
And less the span of the each one’s dissolute life.
This one slept on a bier by baggage claim at the desolate port.

The other went to his consolation encased in a blessed greenwood.
Restless in life, a potential poorly employed,
A piteous man wracked on the inside
Now immolated and destroyed without.
A man’s vibrant dark hair, roiling muscles and full face
Thrashed by time’s tyrannical torture.
His soul frittered away, lost at sea by piece through decades.
The box ships him to fairer shores and to a harbor master
Who forgets his just fare.
And the wake of the sailing spruce
May have drowned remaining ones under the dark face of the deep -
Though by miracle of forgiveness and love
It moves them to breathe again, or for the first time.

And in the moment of greatest terror,
Of deepest despair and highest reaching,
He was alone on the cedar of Lebanon, or the weeping willow, or the Oak of Ur,
Destroyed by time, grayed and stripped naked by foul and feral choices.
Loneliness is the quiet companion to the silent scream of the heart.
Courage of the core has no outward salve.
The self seeing itself sees only the divine physician applying an unsullied bandage
And repairing the ship to ancient glory once enshrined.