I was out on the fantail trying to find pleasure
in Wordsworth, all that over-lush
modification intriguing and annoying me
so that I found myself skipping whole stanzas
while one brave oceangoing seagull
fluttered squawkingly above our wake, waiting,
along with a whole committee of sharks,
for the mess deck’s garbage detail.
Not exactly Tintern Abbey, innocence
mistaken for beauty and fathering the man
with the whole floor rolling on a six-foot swell.
Actually, I kept thinking of Seaman Apprentice Bates
who just weeks before had, in that very spot,
removed his dungarees
and leapt calmly overboard
never to be seen again, since it took half a mile
to stop the huge ship and mount a rescue,
by which time he was beyond intimations
of immortality
or anything else, the sea bright and vacant
as a new dime
or a stanza gleaming in Wordsworth’s notebook
as he rose to announce to his sister
the completion of another masterpiece having
the character of actual “living experience
such that a man might happily drown in.”
Maybe he didn’t drown, maybe the sharks
or the ship’s giant screws
welcomed him as soon as he hit the water.
I thought of his pain and terror
and how some of the crew had joked
about Bates’s “failed waterskiing experiment.”
I imagined that sort of “hang tough” joke
was one of the reasons he jumped
and by way of apology heaved
my copy of Wordsworth over the rail,
a headstone of sorts (though perhaps
a clutch of daffodils would have been
more appropriate), a hopeless
and hopeful gesture such as Wordsworth,
standing by Lucy’s grave, would have understood.
I told Bates, silently, the book was
on the way and he should watch for it, down
there in his desperate sadness
while the ship rollicked on into the gulf
and left him lonely as a cloud.
Christopher Howell has published thirteen collections of poems, most recently Book of Beginnings and Ends (Stephen F. Austin) and The Grief of a Happy Life (Washington). His work has appeared in many journals and more than forty anthologies. He has taught at Eastern Washington University since 1996 and has been director of Lynx House Press for many years.
Photo by beyza yurkturan, obtained from Unsplash+
