From Jan. 10 Sunday

Timmy must smile to himself because he's solipsistic--
rolling canvas to the floor and cutting it with scissors,
a private room in his head, to which we are never invited.

Although he can respond to questions, sooner than later
he retreats into a world that we can never guess about.
No one of us would not rather be somewhere else than here.
We are the reason others can sail the bays and harbors
that we travel by imagination dimmed these coastal winters.
We cut the sails for those who can afford to be elsewhere.

On his own power Tim travels out of this space-time continuum.
And no one else in the sail-shop can see what Tim can see.

Eventually the super lets him go. We would have to continue
our vicarious journeys without him, sliding our padded knees
along the floor with a T-square and some colored pieces of chalk
so that the seamstress can bring together the parts of the sail.

Brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth spill from shelves
in treacherous elastic folds. It was not hard to see them
as bright geometric shapes on water filling with wind
like the resplendent bladders of exotic birds and fish

for enticing the opposite sex. And a spinnaker
made of such a cloth might do such a thing as well
to female homo sapiens. What woman wouldn't
be smitten with the skipper during such an outing?

We'd leave this hole as soon as we could said we to ourselves,
no light at the end of the tunnel, no end to the tunnel.

Those brightly colored bolts of spinnaker cloth
spilled their slippery and treacherous light from locked up cages.