Sailing Alone – by Michael Wing
The bow is time’s arrow so regrets bubble up beside the rudder
times he quit when he should have stayed, what he’s become
Half his lifespan – more – and his regrets are ordinary, boring even
When he sees water chattering down a mountain stream he resents its carelessness
wants it to back up and try again
He craves a boat that cuts the water in laminar flow
it merges behind and nothing is out of place
a boat that leaves no wake
instead of turbulence, missed chances, doubt.
But his boat is the Universe
The water is ether with salt that tastes like the mud he comes from
salt patiently leached from millions of years of crystalline rock
that flavored the ancient oceans no longer on maps
Oceans of everything
Waters of Precambrian genesis, plasma, comets and rain.
His keel senses gravity’s ballast
heels over just so on a port tack but no more
it takes a whole planet to do that
a planet’s worth of gravity against a five knot breeze
so maybe gravity is the weakest thing there is
less than a whisper, fainter than a puff
smaller than dust, a suggestion usually too quiet to hear.
A Star’s fire powers the engine; the awful frenzied percussion of atoms
unspeakable pressure, infinite incandescence
purifying chaos of collision and fusion and transformation
annihilation and rebirth in less than no time
multiplied by the trillions of the trillions
but he does not use the engine today; he rarely has to.
And the hull serves as the planet he lives on, with a cabin that contains food, water, and a place to rest
a domed cave roof to deflect the drops which spray like tiny meteors
a cheese sandwich, an apple and a thermos of something hot
he is starting to think about lunch already
he can lie down below on the V-berth when he isn’t at the tiller
you need a planet but it doesn’t have to be a big one
the flag say who he is
his boat even has a name painted on it, like a planet does.
He is certain his two sails are the reborn spirits of wild birds that he hunted when he was wild
the tundra was sodden and a sky dark gray with loneliness
the snow geese and white-fronted geese from Asia rested on the plains
all the way to the sea, a black line far away
the noisy wind exhilarating
they let us catch them, knew our need
no fewer geese in the sky afterwards
feathers luffed and whirled away as we plucked them
the fat nourished, blood steamed it kept us alive
a boat should have sails.
The rudder and tiller can represent the illusion of autonomy so enough about that, he decides to think about something else instead
Because the mast is the axis of the World Tree – Yggdrasil the Ash-
and the anchor its three roots (there is one Danforth anchor with three pointy ends)
the tree that connects all the worlds
with a spring and a rainbow, frost, an eagle and a drill-toothed squirrel who delivers messages
and don’t visible lines connect everything like phloem and xylem in a tree?
Sheets, shrouds, forestay, halyards, topping lift, downhaul, outhaul, leech lines, boom vang, anchor rode, dock lines, reef points, painter
On board he doesn’t need anything else because his boat is the Universe
five miles away he sees Hog Island
two hundred and forty thousand miles away he can see the Moon
after that it’s harder to think about but
two point five million light years away (after dark) he can make out Andromeda
binocular eyes
at least can wink at the destroying action of time.