Net-Man Blues

Hell, I’ve half-hitched myself to death: this
Around and through, around and through.
I must have knotted my way across the universe
A hanging at a time, line after line,

And worked my way back by some circuitous route
Mending my way across a vast web of space
Stitching string rhomboids between those stars
On this slow-rocket mending needle hand-haul.

Ah, but those nets they made by hand
Must have diced their minds neater
Than the flesh of a fisherman
Rolled up tightly onto his own drum.

:: John Skapsi, in Going for Coffee (1981)

Just Another Walk on Water

When I stumble on the gunwales, now and then
Come visions of missing the handrail some wave:

Of treading water, cold seeping inward,
Watching my boat drive on driverless.
(Regretting I could never train it
To come when I whistled.)
Treading water with that ship receding
The only dot of heat on the horizon.

Wondering just what I’d say to myself
In that last wet conversation.

:: John Skapsi, in Going for Coffee (1981)

Undercut

Weather-shy, they call them:
The ones found always
To the landward side of a fleet,
Someone hostage between themselves and the sea.
Edgy at the first whine in the rigging.

Sometimes, it’s that rogue wave,
That rock breaking suddenly by your bow,
Or that one time
When it seemed the boat would never right:
When maybe someone else didn’t make it.
That time the sea drove your stomach high
Into your throat, and threw fear
Like a glass float blown into the grass
Far above some storm-tide line in the mind.

Or, just a steady accretion;
Silting of small starts and heart-races,
Recollections of faces simply no longer seen,
Sedimentation of times you knew you didn’t know.
Those flashes when you could see the catastrophe
And its end: yourself bloated, like a marker buoy
Floating at the end of your net.

These waves break, break, and break on
Wearing away, regardless how slow, until that day
They finally grind you smaller than the sea.

:: John Skapsi, in Going for Coffee (1981)