April 2022
Bio Note: I was in the army during the First Gulf War. I never left Texas during the war, but it definitely was a formative part of my youth. I've trained in the martial arts, done many men's weekends, and spent the last 20 years teaching English and Reading courses at a community college. For all my searching for what it means to be a man, the answer, at least for me, came in helping others and being a father. Seems like a simple answer I should have found sooner.
Twelve Men on a Boat
Smoke from Canadian wildfires turns the setting sun
into an orange ball over a lake in northern Minnesota.
Twelve men cruise the lake in a pontoon boat ignoring
a large, yellow “Maximum capacity 10 person” sticker
on the pilot’s console.
For seven, and one in particular, a last-minute offering
of edibles deepens the soothing motion of the boat
The ride out is narrated: water depths, forestry, and local
landmarks named by the man who is the third generation
keeper of two rustic cabins, a cook’s shed, and the land some
of us are tenting on.
Reaching the end of the lake, we reverse course;
the sun now a crisp circle behind us.
We stop and the older men tell stories of Robert Bly.
This is, after all, a group of men who gather under
the purpose of love.
Men need love. They need to receive it and to give it,
especially to themselves.
Men’s love isn’t pretty or a set of rules, thus the twelve men
on a ten-man boat.
I didn’t know Bly, but I read a poem at one of his workshops, once.
When they said he was beautiful and an asshole, I can’t say
I was surprised.
When they said he was beautiful and an asshole, I can’t say
I was surprised.
Only men with sharp edges can cut through the bullshit
built up in other men’s lives, but only men armed with love
can create a space where we can be truly brave,
vulnerable.
Then we check in, a circle of men. At 50, I am one of the youngest.
None of the older men are my future; I am none of their pasts.
Everyman is on his own journey, but that journey
can’t be done alone, which is why I’m on a boat on Fall Lake,
outside Ely, Minnesota, listening to silver-haired men
who have helped and still help men discover how to love themselves.
One of them giggles like a ninth grader at the back of the bus because
it had been a while and that edible was stronger than he thought
it would be.
Love takes many forms. It comes in songs, the occasional shared
edible, often hidden in insults, but true love, the kind we all so
desperately need, recognizes the light and dark inside each and
everyone one of us.
When the check-in is over, after each man, minus the giggler,
has said something that matters to him, a minute of silence
is simply more shared space.
The sun has set, at least one running light is out, and this
increasingly illegal pontoon boat takes us back to camp
lighter and more connected than when we left.
©2022 Steve Anderson
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