Reconstructed

Ode To Broken Things

                                                                        -PABLO NERUDA

Things get broken 
at home 
like they were pushed 
by an invisible, deliberate smasher. 
It's not my hands 
or yours 
It wasn't the girls 
with their hard fingernails 
or the motion of the planet. 
It wasn't anything or anybody 
It wasn't the wind 
It wasn't the orange-colored noontime 
Or night over the earth 
It wasn't even the nose or the elbow 
Or the hips getting bigger 
or the ankle 
or the air. 
The plate broke, the lamp fell 
All the flower pots tumbled over 
one by one. That pot 
which overflowed with scarlet 
in the middle of October, 
it got tired from all the violets 
and another empty one 
rolled round and round and round 
all through winter 
until it was only the powder 
of a flowerpot, 
a broken memory, shining dust. 

And that clock 
whose sound 
was 
the voice of our lives, 
the secret 
thread of our weeks, 
which released 
one by one, so many hours 
for honey and silence 
for so many births and jobs, 
that clock also 
fell 
and its delicate blue guts 
vibrated 
among the broken glass 
its wide heart 
unsprung. 

Life goes on grinding up 
glass, wearing out clothes 
making fragments 
breaking down 
forms 
and what lasts through time 
is like an island on a ship in the sea, 
perishable 
surrounded by dangerous fragility 
by merciless waters and threats. 

Let's put all our treasures together 
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold -- 
into a sack and carry them 
to the sea 
and let our possessions sink 
into one alarming breaker 
that sounds like a river. 
May whatever breaks 
be reconstructed by the sea 
with the long labor of its tides. 
So many useless things 
which nobody broke 
but which got broken anyway

The Sea When Young

On December 29th, we went offshore at last.  It had been a long time, too long, three months of finding work and a place, of fixing the boat, of learning what we might be together having leapt from two different worlds into a new one of our own making.  Where we would head became a matter of time, weather, what Bryan's folks could handle.  We considered the Keys, north up the Intercoastal Waterway, and the Bahamas.  We settled on Bimini, about fifty miles from Miami, a relatively easy sail with decent facilities for Bryan's folks who had some vision and mobility issues.

The deciding factor was open water.  Once you've been out of sight of land, in deep water, time stretching so it could be any day, any year, all times, all years, you find yourself hungering for it, seeking it out.  My time offshore taught me how it feels to be on the right course, even with no landmarks in sight.  It taught me the feel of steady as she goes.  I don't always have a name for this hunger.  I don't always know that it is a hunger at all.  It's still so new.  But once I am out in it, even if I'm feeling less than sea-worthy (my first day offshore seems to be marked by seasickness which dissipates after but seems to be a physical manifestation of the vertigo that comes for me when I leave land for water), I understand this is what I've been missing, what I've needed.

Bimini is the closest of the islands of the Bahamas to Miami.  A small island, it is at its core as much as it tries to be the like the US, completely, and unabashedly itself.   It's there, buried, under the tourism, under the old marinas that draw the power boaters and sports fishermen, the cruisers and true sailors, under the new marina on the north end of the North Island and those cookie-cutter, three-bedroom, three-bath "shacks" they built there for the rich outsiders who want a piece of this place no matter what it costs to the island or the people who live there.  It smacks of colonialism, this sheltered enclave which ultimately will have little contact with the rest of the island beyond it's pampered youth finding their way to Alice Town to cause trouble, as if it was theirs, which of course they will think it is.  Of course the old marinas carry the taint of colonialism too; we just tend to pretend they don't.  And yet the island has had its way all these years, despite those who have made a claim on it.  It will continue as it has, despite the rich and entitled, going on long after.  You can see it from the beach, in the old stone of the land, in the vast span of the ocean, in this small island that has survived relentless water and wind and seismic forces.  It's old, Bimini, and young too, all at the same time, which is how I feel walking this island, looking out at the sea, a blue so young and hopeful.

I'm not young.  The white hair I see every morning in the mirror reminds me that the years passed outnumber the years left and yet, these months of leap and faith, hope and love, have me feeling like the ocean around Bimini - young, thrilled and thrilling, like I was in that place between childhood and adult back when I roamed Sunset Beach with just the ocean as my companion.   What does it mean to be both young and ancient?  What is a young sea?  Rough? Eager? Warm? Restless?  Here, at this age, with a man who is so much the boy I almost remember and the man I fell in love with, I think I'm coming to find out. Time will tell, as it always does.

Tangled in the Rigging?

"It didn't surprise me to look up into the early morning sky and see the waning moon tangled in the rigging, in a sky .  To choose a life on the water is to give yourself up to the tides, the outer ones and the ebb and flow of your own inner waters.  So when I glanced up and saw her so bright in a morning sky that perfect color of blue that lasts for an hour, maybe more, it came to me exactly what I had chosen, why I was here.  Yes it was love, and living, but something more too.  I left a dry place where I dreamt of water and came to a place where water abounds, a waterlogged land blessed with an astonishing abundance -- of green, of moisture, of birds, of a lush and tropical beauty."

I wrote this toward the end of November and found it after New Year's, more than a month later, after a span of busy-ness that always seems part and parcel of the holidays.  I re-disovered it after listening to an NPR story about how we change more than we think we do.  Here's the crux of it: The researchers found that "people underestimated how much they will change in the future. People just didn't recognize how much their seemingly essential selves would shift and grow.

And this was true whether they were in their teen years or middle-aged.

'"Life is a process of growing and changing, and what our results suggest is that growth and change really never stops," says Gilbert, "despite the fact that at every age from 18 to 68, we think it's pretty much come to a close."

Personality changes do take place faster when people are younger, says Gilbert, so "a person who says I've changed more in the past decade than I expect to change in the future is not wrong."

But that doesn't mean they fully understand what's still to come. "Their estimates of how much they'll change in the future are underestimates," says Gilbert. "They are going to change more than they realize. Change does slow; it just doesn't slow as much as we think it will."'

It struck me, reading this draft entry, forgotten in the pre-Christmas rush, the place I was then, compared to where I am now.  A month ago and I was strong and sure, prepared for the next step along my path.  A month passes and my skies are a bit cloudy, a 30% chance always seeming to herald a downpour.  If a month can bring such a change, what potential does a year have?  A decade?  How could we think of ourselves, even at the ripe age of fifty-four as static beings, just refining ourselves, altering slightly but in our essentials, the same?  

Where was I going with this month-old bit of prose?  Was I going to wax on deliriously at this moment of rightness when I knew I was just where I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be with?  Was I going somewhere a little dark, sensing at my edges the doubt that marks me, my Libra legacy.  Certainly the word "tangled" sits a little oddly, a word that insinuated itself into body and title.

They ebb and flow, surety, doubt, at least for me.  There's a bit of Florida's watery nature within me, something tidal that is always either becoming or letting go, embracing or releasing.  I read once entropy, specifically chemical entropy, was the desire to hold and the desire to be held, two forces that increased and lessened.  In synchrony, we hold and are held, one stronger as the other weakens, the weak strengthening as the strong fails.  It seemed a more hopeful view of the force that drives things apart, that sends satellites through failing orbits, crashing to earth, that will tug at our universe, pulling us farther apart.  Now I feel it, that urge to hold and be held tipping this way and that.  I can see how at it's edges it can be pretty ugly, but in that Hegelian between is love and family, friends and community.  It's connections that span decades, giving and taking, tipping this way and that, always searching for its equinox.  I realize, writing this, that I am a bit black and white about things, a little judgmental.  If balance is the key, then only balance will do.  I tend not to see things as a journey, in balance's case, something that comes and goes and comes again, with a periodicity that can be counted on but the moment or two or three, there and then gone.  I forget to enjoy those moments, to settle in the knowing they will come again.  I so regret the loss or so hope for the return that all the time between, the real stuff of life, I never quite enjoy as I could.

Florida has been an interesting stop for me.  I always knew it was never my final destination although, once here, I began to act as if it was.  Always a planner, it's hard for me to have chosen a life without a particular end, choosing a life that must be sailed as opposed to visited, the journey really everything.  I keep thinking this is so unlike me, but maybe I've changed that much and I just never realized.  Maybe this is exactly like me, this me.  I guess we will see.