The Story: Sailor Joe

A quest is a clean word until it meets a harbor. Young sailor Joe tried his best to steer his ship toward the west, on a new spiritual quest where all was told and all confessed. The paint agrees with the trying. The water is worked hard. The sail takes the light and does not explain itself. A man can point a ship at a better life and still carry one room he will not open.

Except the part about Isobella, the dancer in Barcelona. The poem saves her for the last line, which is where a withheld truth belongs. She is not a scandal pasted on. She is the exception that makes the confession incomplete. A spiritual quest that omits one person is not a failure of faith. It is a proof that the heart kept something back. Barcelona is named so the omission has a street, a night, a body. The dancer is not asked to be forgiven. She is asked to be remembered.

The picture does not show her. That is the mercy and the wound. What we see is the wake, the gold dragged through blue, the boat small against the weather it chose. Joe is not in the frame because the poem has already put him at the helm of a sentence. The work is about the distance between a life told and a life lived.

Sailor Joe belongs in Fables in the Fog. It keeps the rhyme, and it spends the rhyme on a grown omission. Look at the water long enough and the lesson is plain. A man may sail west. He does not get to pretend the harbor never happened.

Collection:   Fables in the Fog