prose of Sept 5 09

Surely this would be a day to sail upon the open sea,
a day to be a skipper on one’s own sea craft. Who are these people
who decorate their houses from ships and the ships chandlery,
who this pipe-smoking patriarch who mutters to his guests
about floor-boards retrieved from what antebellum schooner
of which he thought he found a print in a second-hand shop?
Who are these people, nearly immobile, among so many instruments
for movement, polished in their disuse to shine, but once tarnished
by exposure to the elements, use? Who presides over the local
historical society, which would-be seaman has lost his mind
among these maritime artifacts, whose mind has halted
among the chandlery items, muttering about the places on the globe
from which they came? Which port of call? The cocoons in the trees,
wrapped in silk, among oaks, don’t sway, the air so still.
A river pushes through a dam, water ground through turbines
Into threads of silky water — the old man who mutters, leaning on his mantle,
has lost his mind to thoughts of water’s power, relating
the history of floorboards as a schooner’s deck beneath the feet
of teller and those to whom the tale can yet again be told.
But for the listener, the tales sound rehearsed, about the compass,
astrolabe and floor-boards, as if the house were the ship,
this somnolent teller the captain, and the arrows in the artifacts
could move, ship sunk in earth, ready to sail, its crew spellbound,
the listener as neccessary to the tale as the teller himself,
leaning there, all the the paintings maritime, old sailboats, stormy moons,
lulling voyages, whose itineraries lull their passengers into stone.
Of the shipman who stands before the mantle, house guests before him
—well his mind stopped long ago.