The problem is the voices
I can’t get out of my head. On the bridge, the captain’s playing
“Break On Through”; he’s been
Playing “Stormy Weather.” Go ahead, Google World’s
Roughest Crossing. Google
Shipwreck, and Lost at Sea. Meanwhile, the ship
Is tearing itself
Apart beam by steel beam; the ship is gnawing its own liver
And the sea is eating
Its heart out and wants me to sashay right on by and take
A look. Lean over
The rail, little one, lean a little farther. The problem is the voices. Sea,
Sea, you’re all foam
Vanishing, cry of shearwater and albatross wing knitting
You to sky; you are height
And depth and open mouth, and I am barely a morsel. Sea, I can’t get out
Of my head, or is it you’re
What I can’t get my poor head around, what I don’t know how to measure—
A twenty-foot sea, a thirty-foot sea. Not a falling so much as a
Career, a sinking
So much as a gulp. Measure from where the surface would be
If I could find it, if
The idea of surface hadn’t become a moving target I plummet
Past into the trough and know
No better on the ride back up into yippee, though on the wave’s crest
Three days out
I swear I can see South America. This is the best
Thing ever, clinging
To the rail watching another wave crash all the way over the bow, over
The captain high
In his bridge, the captain who will carry us through with his instruments
And playlist and steel-hulled
Gut, though he says everyone has a threshold, even him. Chris and Jenny,
Most of the passengers
Green in their berths along with half the crew. And me, I am used
To the world appearing
To wish me well. All those summer weeks spent reading in the Jeep
While Dad careened us down
The roughest roads he could find, Mom rigged to some near
Cliff face by
Thin rope. Isn’t a mountain a wave moving slow? I am
Used to the best
Kind of luck and a stomach that can ride out anything, even
The swell
Of my own hubris. All day I stand on deck with the birds
And spray, birds
That can sail across oceans without moving their wings. Wherever
I look, infinity’s blue
And gray, and I say Okay already, give me all you’ve got.
ISSUE: Fall 2012