LIFE AT SEA (POEM)

Life at Sea 

©1964, 2013 Dean Metcalf

                             

A sailor in a bar

said this to me:

"There is no life

like the life at sea

when the stars are

     close and bright and your own;

the night sky is a cool dark lake

and flying fish flutter and leap

from the bow's white and pearly

phosphorescent wake."

He talked awhile of sunsets

in the South Pacific,

with all the Western sky

awash in rose and gold;

he spoke of wild-eyed, salt-rimed men

and of the sights and sounds and smells

     of Eastern ports

and people with half-closed, slanted eyes

               and yellow skin.

"But what," I asked,

"of months away from home,

of wet fog and rain squalls and times

     when the ocean

     and the ship

     and all the world

are in sickening, neverending motion?"

He smiled a slight, sad, half-smile and said,

"I see you've been to sea yourself,"

and I said yes,

I had.

                              Feb 29 1964 USS MONTROSE

SUNSET OVER KLAMATH LAKE

Sunset Over Klamath Lake

     Coli Avenue was a dirt street two blocks long. (Thirty years later, it still was.) Our house sat on a knoll between the highway's north entrance to Klamath Falls and the southern end of Klamath Lake. The Cascade Range rose against the sky beyond the lake to the west.     

     One day in 1960 I walked to the mailbox and took out a form letter addressed to me from the Veterans' Administration saying my father was dead. I read it standing by the mailbox. It didn't seem to affect me much at the time. I was seventeen; I'd last seen him when I was eight. 

     One evening after the VA letter came I went behind the house and stood on the knoll and looked out over the lake. It was sunset. The Cascades were an uneven indigo line against the western sky; Mt. McLaughlin still had snow draped around its shoulders. Wind moved clouds around the sky above the mountains; the sun's afterglow played with shades of red, palest pink to crimson of arterial blood, even on to purple. There was enough rain about to punctuate the burning clouds with strokes of grey. 

     The pulsating sky sent tremors through me. An electric arc seemed to jump between my past and future, not distant in time but perhaps in place. The sky seemed to be a signal from that future, a call to go places and do things. It thrilled and frightened me. I couldn't wait to get there. 

     Years later, studying Russian, I would learn the word toská which means, primarily, longing. It combines longing for something one is separated from with sadness at the separation. It can be a longing for something which once was but can never be again, or something desired for the future but which one knows can never be. 

     Now, on the rare occasion when I encounter the word toská, I remember the evening I stood looking across Klamath Lake at the sunset over the Cascades. I also remember how short was the time between that evening of longing and my arrival on the far side of the world in situations far less beautiful, far less calm, far more violent.