October 2015
My early education, at the hands of Dominicans, informed me of all things possible and impossible right out of a few pages of Plato's Phaedo, set down over four-hundred years before their savior walked the earth. As far as I may wander, I am pulled back to those few tenets: the transitory nature of human existence, the necessity of denial, the tensions of extremes, the hope of the sublime. I live in Tucson with my wife Jane Catherine, a watercolorist, and with our dog, Irish. My more recent work has appeared in The North American Review, The French Literary Review, Verse Daily, and others. FutureCycle will publish my selected poems in 2016.
Author's Note: This poem, "Boy in a Boat," was written for/about my son, but I'd been reading about Shelley and his paper boats, and the more I thought over the idea, the more my son assumed the posture and form of "another" more suggestive of an ethereal form. So it is him, but also changes in its unearthly aspects.
Boy in a Boat
The boy in the boat did not care
if he said the right word or if a word
was said, if he moved or if he did not,
reclining on the bow, indifferent
as if enigma never seized him,
his eyes still covered with morning glaze,
adrift in the Pacific inlet, on still water
into the evening & each evening
was the same.
He wore my father’s oversized shirt,
& like my son, we sometimes shared
that long & distant look of distraction.
There was this & something more
I would always envy,
love & never understand,
in the boat he did not care
if he worshiped me
or some other minor god of the air.
-originally appeared in Transversales, (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY 2013.)
The boy in the boat did not care
if he said the right word or if a word
was said, if he moved or if he did not,
reclining on the bow, indifferent
as if enigma never seized him,
his eyes still covered with morning glaze,
adrift in the Pacific inlet, on still water
into the evening & each evening
was the same.
He wore my father’s oversized shirt,
& like my son, we sometimes shared
that long & distant look of distraction.
There was this & something more
I would always envy,
love & never understand,
in the boat he did not care
if he worshiped me
or some other minor god of the air.
-originally appeared in Transversales, (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY 2013.)
©2015 Michael Gessner