30 Years Old Today

Ashes of Roses

for m.

Brittle dried blood petals there

roses kept for future time

collected for her wedding day,

the petals wait in a box of brass.

She slipped away like morning dreams

in fluid darkness down she spun

last kick unfelt that starry night,

we dreamt of running daughters then.

When she was born, her body warmed

by womb, she lacked just breath alone,

and faintly, slightly stirred as she

lay on Dawn's weeping, empty heart.

Petals wait in a box of brass

her ashes in a box of wood.

Originally published in the Maine Review, Spring 1980

Fallen Leaves

Spring and Fall:

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

"I am entirely destitute, having lost my boat"

This image is from a poster in the Galway City Museum which we visited last summer as part of our vacation in the British Isles. The title of this post comes from the caption on the image. I enjoyed the museum, it was just the right size for an hour or so respite. According to our local source, it isn't thought much of by the Galway locals, being a modern building and having replaced a much older building attached to the Spanish Arch itself. But it is well worth the visit, if only to see a Galway hooker. It is not every day you can visit a hooker with your wife and get away with it!

Today I was mowing the back yard (well actually mulching the leaves more than cutting any grass) and as I mowed around my sailboat, I realized that I hadn't taken it out for over two years. It is time to get rid of the thing once and for all, especially now that I don't have a truck to even pull it. I don't expect to replace it and to be sure it wasn't much of a boat, but it will mark the end of another hobby. Dawn says my problem is I can't afford my hobbies. I under-capitalize them, if you will, and that is the case with a sailboat. I have been lucky enough to have sailed a couple of times in my life - although as it turns out, none of those friends still own a boat either. It is something that I love to watch and do, but it is also something that takes money and time away from other things, like family and work, so now I am, as I used to say 'on the hard'. At least I can still visit the ocean whenever I want to, even if from the landward side.

This poem is from a book I bought in Galway entitled Swallow of the Sea, Pages from a Yacht's Log, by Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, published in London in 1937. It is entitled A July Thought in a High Place

A gentian hull
And fox-brown sail;
Cry of a gull,
And laverock's hail;
Green sea that reaches
Score upon score
Of silver beaches
And rocky shore;
Far-away Skye
Where cummulus mops
All day long lie
On the Coolin tops;
Lord of the Sea!
Let me remember
This Quiet beauty
through my December.

When I was in school, I had a fencing buddy who had built a scale model of the Constitution and was writing a novel about life on board that frigate. Duke had never, to my knowledge, sailed, let alone blue water sailed. But he was undaunted. (And this was long before any of us had heard of Captain Jack Aubrey and the common knowledge of seamanship we have all learned from him.) Maybe I need to get out on the Facebooks and the Interwebs and see where my old friend sails today. There are oceans of data out there that I am well equipped to cruise. . . . .