“I think poems are pieces of talk, savored and sustained.
I would call them ‘lucky talk.’”
—William Stafford, “A Witness for Poetry”
Yesterday at Kroger, I heard a boy, maybe 7,
say to his father: We have two eyes and two arms
and two legs. Why don’t we have two penises?
I love language most when it slips up on us like this.
Which is why, of course, poets sneak up their ears
in cafes and bars. I’ve never done that
with anybody, and I’m certainly not going to
do it with you, I heard, unmoored from its context,
as I pretended to study Pazzo’s menu.
And later that same lucky day: Jonathan’s
not a bad person really; he’s just insufferable.
My wife, always the dutiful daughter, brought
her mother a bright Sunday bouquet.
These flowers are so beautiful, she said,
they look artificial. And my favorite,
from Luis Polonia on ESPN after being traded
from New York: The Yankees are interested
in only one thing, and I don’t know what that is.
~Jeff Worley, ‘Lucky Talk’, from #32 – Winter 2009: “My fellow Kansan Bill Stafford was one of my earliest influences as I began to try to make my way as a poet, and after I met him at the University of Cincinnati in 1984, we corresponded fairly regularly. I think Bill would like this little poem, and I’m happy to have him ‘introduce’ it in an epigraph.”
Alaska Lucky Talk
The stainless and cast iron hanging in the galley syncopated to a random pattern of sways and dips the wind was delivering straight onto the beam, even here inside the breakwater. Wet dock lines squealed under the load, a clattering and clanging of halyards and tackle passed with the whistling murmurings of the rising and falling blow gripping us. Graupel smacked the windows with each squall, topped off by a sideways rain leaving stinging red marks on exposed hands. The computerized NOAA weather voice was calmly, robotically squawking from the VHF, a voice that always reminded me of Marvin from Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitchiker’s Guide‘, disappointed with having to report 20 foot seas and gusts to 75 out there, well offshore in the purple black winters dark of the ‘gulf where, should you choose to venture, you would see the streaks on the face of breaking combers just before you realized the world of trouble now imminent.
In the middle of the cacophony, asleep in the foc’sle, it was actually the sound of the 140-quart cooler taking flight over the handrail that woke me up. Tied to a line on a forward cleat, making that cartoon elastic-sound when it reached its end, not traveling farther than beneath the boat, it certainly doesn’t take much water-living to learn to tie stuff down. And you get to know sounds that belong, and those that don’t, even in your sleep. Walking out onto the aft deck, a quick visual sweep for anything else that might decide to go airborne, he caught my eye, laboring in the darkness and the rumbling gale, carried with instinct and well-practiced procedure, methodically pulling his dock lines: he was going out.
As any Norwegian salt would responsibly report, a boat is a wood boat. The standard by which all others are measured. Physically recoiling in horror from the thought of a Tupperware boat (fiberglass), wouldn’t be caught anywhere in one of those beer cans (aluminum), no, there really is only one boat. It shall be made of wood, and our our home for that winter was the assigned spot next to his timber troller:
As if she was sneering at the sky above, a sleek 40-footer or so with long sloping lines of lapped plank that abruptly ended with the bronze chain-plated forestay at the bow, a low-set deck from midship aft, setup with an old Lehman and tall wood poles, the running and warming 4-cylinder sounded more like a 3-cylinder with a polyrhythmic purr, a hiccup followed by a stuttering exhale, hih-hicka-POO-hih-hicka-POO-hih-hicka-POO. Without the benefit of the 30-amp power pole on the float and what must have been an array of pumps continuously running below deck, she probably would have been sitting at the bottom of the harbor long ago. At one time white, the entire affair now long past the need for paint, only 2 perfectly appropriate faded letters remained across her starboard bow above where he was working: ‘ir‘.
Extending out past a tattered co-op ballcap pushed back on his head yet somehow still stuck there in the wind, a half-enjoyed cigarette still burning and dangling from a snarled lip beneath wide, wild blue-green eyes. He pushed his glasses up and removed the cigarette with the same hand already holding a rope, stopped what he was doing entirely to stand up straight and nod, almost formally, as he looked back at me and what I am sure was my stunned face.
Then, he began to speak. Very loudly, against buffeting winds, slapping water, the clang and clap and splatter of the storm, it was clear he was in his element, completely at ease, now exactly where he belonged: waving one arm toward the ‘sound, shaking a frayed rope in his other as if to demonstrate something important, the bouncing glow of the cigarette animated his words in the darkness, ending his statement with a loud unbounded laughter, smacking his knee for emphasis. Talking the entire time he was making his way aft, he chucked the bow line over the rail and in one deft movement undid the hip line and stepped aboard, finally reaching for the throttle and gearbox to load up the Ford quietly hiccup-purring below deck.
As she slipped astern bobbing and dipping in the wind and water, he leaned out and looked back once more, a creased bristled face briefly and weakly illuminated from underneath by a couple of tiny, old-school amber and green 12-volt lights on the console. He removed the cigarette, and pointed out into the darkness with it between two fingers, his eyebrows went up, grinning at me then hollering, exhaling through flying slop and spit the only word I understood him say during this entire interaction: “FEESH!”
Puttering and nudging her into position, the exit required a hard-to-port u-turn before he put the spurs to her, transforming the once tiny voice of the motor into a solidly determined rumbling growl, committing to the tempest, slipping between the rocks, he was gone.
Fishing.
We had met several times before that night, in more fair conditions, when it was mostly me listening to him talk and squinting with confusion. From inside the boat, it always sounded like a combination of muttering Popeye and Cousin It when he would stop by in the mornings to speak with his buddy, but I am sure that she was learning Norwegian long before ever deciding how to interpret and learn English words from the likes of my voice.
He would lean across the rail and look right at her, she was hypnotized, four eyes fixed on each other, his bony index finger extended to nudge her knee and the swing back with each forward arc, him yarbl-garp-n-ayebuh-oy and her cackling with laughter, unable to contain myself I had to step through the door and watch. An impeccably honorable gentleman, soon as he saw me he stood up straight, hoisted a bucket out to shoulder-height and smiled at me, no words, then setting it on the deck: fresh catch, dinner.
He gee-gee’d at her once more, nodded and walked away, no less an inscrutable, yet complete and perfect poetry that came with such a larger-than-life character attached to it.