Day Sailing
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Originally published in 1969.
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Day Sailing - David R. Slavitt
I
DAY SAILING
1.
Distance deceives. Novelists mistake
extent for weight, their thicknesses
for acuity. Endurance rarely
endures. Chichester, Bannister,
Sisyphus sweat. Lazier,
I cannot believe that far,
go to no such lengths.
Day sailing in a small catboat in the bay
satisfies me, who have nowhere to go.
What rarity have the Indies now
but famine, cholera and war,
what riches for a new Magellan
or Drake to take from that arduous route?
The Pacific boils with testing;
Atlantis is long sunk.
Still, the mainsheet tugs,
tiller and centerboard purr.
The wind blows the hair.
I go sailing.
2.
It is conversation of craft and force,
the wind so, and the sail and rudder so;
it is compromise between the wind
and me, a settling for that bluff, that flagpole,
and tacking back, beating up the wind,
achieving direction out of indirection;
it is balancing, my weight
to windward, heeling to leeward;
it is a triumph, for civilization is
neither writing, nor painting pictures, nor forging metal,
nor breeding animals, nor sowing grain,
but sailing into the wind, sailing to westward,
the knowing, the craft.
The cove at low tide
swarms, gulls and terns,
sandpipers, and crows
pick over the shingle,
small crabs start,
clams squirt, worms
snake in the rich reek
of sea-wrack rot.
The muck smacks soles,
oozes between my toes.
I bring to the hull a cloth, a plank, a stick,
and bring the hull to life, and it brings me
off the shingle, into the narrow channel,
and out into the bay. The fetor fades
to salt. The wind freshens.
I have my craft—a skill, a trade, duplicity,
a small boat.
3.
The intricate maneuvering for the sake
of maneuvering, or to put myself in the sun
for my tan, or out of the sun for fear of burn,
or just to adjust the look of the boat is not
different from our comfortable lives ashore,
neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy,
except that sometimes when a fresh wind comes up
out of nowhere, out of the south, and I
have to head south to the cove, and the spray breaks
over the bow, and the boat slants, riding, riving
the water, comes about sharp, smart, to find
that it is, I am, seaworthy is something.
I am no sailor, but there is no virtue
wholly irrelevant. The seaman with the oar
must find the farmer willing to improvise
some use for what he carries, able to see
it could make do, perhaps, as a winnowing fan.
PRECAUTIONS
The twin red pennants of gale warnings drooped
in the dead calm air. Alma, the radio said,
was off Atlantic City: still, the harbor
was still and the air. A mosquito looped
in triumph over the wind of his small will
in virtuoso passes about my head.
I hauled the boat ashore. It was heavy labor.
My boots were heavy. Everything was still
as an impasto landscape not yet dry,
or, if reports be true, as Alma’s eye.
I stripped the boat, carried the spars to a bluff
above the reach of any tide. Their varnish
soaked up the sun like syrup, and the sweat
poured down my back like syrup. Good enough.
I dug the anchor into the mud and left
the storm to do its worst, thinking the swinish
weekenders whose boats rode light would get
the wrecks they deserved, spars snapped, their craft adrift
in gale force winds to founder. I drove home
to wait for the weather reports, and the weather to come.
That night it rained some, and the wind rose
but only a little. Eight on the black nine,
and still no storm, or storm but out to sea.
Seven on the eight. I went to bed. All those
boats of the careless