Today I will different

After a summer on the boat away from my desk and the internet, save speedy incursions into my email boxes from laundromats equipped with wifi, I've stockpiled quite a bit of work. I thought of back-dating and posting it all, but the organizational effort involved in that exercise of documentary fiction--"as if" I really were here, posting chronologically, all summer--made me miserable and hopeless. I felt as if I'd never be caught up. Add to that, the commencement of a new teaching semester, and I began to feel overwhelmed. Until some part of me--the better part of me--rebelled. Why begin a new term in arrears? Why not simply begin today, and see what happens? Sudden relief, as if I could breathe again.

Today's poem then, another sonnet (something about this form is haunting me, and bit by bit, creating its own shape), thematically apt.

You wake, you say
today will be different, today
I will do what I do what I must what I will
today I will      efficient      today
tasks completed     today    organized   today
desk in order.
Today I will   different.
Do today as if some one other
un-waylaid by wind or whim or
        : this is the song you sing when you're dancing with a ghost
when samba flings your solar plexus when
deepstep come shining across
your painted sill  waves at your feet suck
sand to sea  beckon you to swim.

Notes

Italicized lines quote Alice Notley (the song you sing) from Benediction (2000)--the version found in her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poetry and C.D. Wright (deepstep come shining), from, of course, her Deepstep Come Shining (1998).

The photo, of old, new and blasted trees rooted in the same spot, was taken in a provincial park on Keats Island in Howe Sound, BC.

Seasick

20 February 2010
16 hour crossing from Bahia San Carlos, Sonora to Caleta San Juanico, Baja California Sur

 

There aren't really any pictures for this story--and if there were, you wouldn't want to see them.

I have a confession to make: even after all these years, I still get seasick.  To hear others tell about it, I'm blessed (cursed) with only the mildest version of the affliction, a vague and generalized nausea resulting in an inability to eat--probably caused more by anxiety and excessive gripping of stomach muscles as we leap from wave to wave than true motion sickness.  Small doses of Gravol help, and time cures the problem--not so apparently with more violent forms of sea sickeness. 

It's frustrating.  There's the boat, doing what she's meant to do, and Marike grinning and whooping and riding the waves like a cowboy.  I have utter confidence in both of them; both handle the seas far better than I can or ever will.  Indeed, they are in their element there, sails taut, wind singing through the rigging, boat plunging through the waves.  I'M the problem, and I know it.  Setting off into large seas, I'm like an ungainly dancer, a figure who knows no rhythm and clumps about in poor shoes, awkward, dropping on the downbeat, missing the upbeat, swinging forever the wrong way.  And I know if I can just relax, just settle into or find the rhythm of the boat's motion, I'll be fine.  But somehow, for a time, no matter what I do, I can't.  I'm like a polka dancer at a samba party, stomping when I should be flying.  

Sometimes sleep helps--to lie down, let go--holding myself up in all that plunging is hard work--always one hand for the task, one for myself.  Then, as I dream, the music of the boat slips into my bones.  I breathe--though sometimes this takes hours--deeply.  There.  Finally, the dance; the pleasure of the blue blue sea and the force of the wind and this rollicking motion hour after hour and into the night, whirl of stars above and dolphins leaping alongside us.