January 23, 2008
WEDNESDAY POEM
On Watch
Harry Walsh
Some watches at sea
I was so alert
I could see things before they appeared.
Sensing pending arrivals
I would watch a point
on the horizon
until certainly a mast was there,
a needle point of light,
or dawn.
Once I stared at a spot
on the surface of the ocean
beneath which I knew
A whale waited.
I have watched stars
by concentrating on an empty
and dark place in the night.
Watched doors, windows
and miles
waiting for someone
invisible always
but for the turbulence of their passing.
Posted by Jim Culleny at 12:32 AM | Permalink
Comments
This poem is accurate enough as to the facts of standing watch and looking out over the sea, watching for ships at night being the requirement. And yet, Walsh for whatever reason almost completely leaves out the sensory intensity of that work. There were advantages to standing watch on the wings of the bridge--where the view was longer perhaps with a greater sense of the round world we were in the midst of. But when the weather's calm enough to permit standing on the bow where there’s no engine noise, no perpetuity of roaring steam and banging turbines. Out on the bow where all there is is weather and the only sound is that of the sea torn asunder and immediately under foot by the bow itself. That was a privilege of life as a lookout. Especially heading North, when we were low and loaded with cargo and the sea merely six or eight feet below the stanchions, and there was sea smell and spray and salt in the air. It is a business of horizons, standing lookout. Most difficult on cloudy nights, when the overcast is both low and the usual twenty-five mile range of view foreshortened by the thick air. Walsh offers nothing about the distraction of the sea itself as it streams by, full of glowing blue-green orbs and streamers of diatomic phosphorus or on nights clear and moonlit and full of white silver glory.
What he does get and well is the curious suspense of seeing and nearly seeing points of light at the limits of the horizon. Especially the mast lights of those passing vessels that must have passed at the most tangential limit of our circumference. Lights we might see momentarily, teasingly to disappear and appear, sometimes to grow into a full blown presence of ships lights, close enough to differentiate. But often they were mere points, there and gone, so that you might dreamt them only. And, too, he gets the way one studies the dimmer, more fascinating constellations, such as the Pleides, that almost can't be seen directly, that are too faint for fovea but shine somehow more visibly on the edges of vision, seen best by looking less than directly at them.
Posted by: Dwight Homer | Jan 23, 2008 6:18:16 PM
Mr. Homer,
Thanks for your thoughtful and generous reading and for reminding me of the intense sensuality of being there. I sailed on trawlers and ocean going tugs, deckhand to captain and if I had stayed on the former I would now be an old man being useful mending nets on the dock. I lost the ocean in a vicious NY tugboat strike when captains who would not cross the lines were fired.
Posted by: Harry Walsh | Jan 23, 2008 6:47:31 PM
Lovely poem, Harry. Nice to see you here!
Posted by: Abbas Raza | Jan 24, 2008 3:49:03 AM
Great poem, Harry. I love the concreteness of the vanishing point, the equation actually solved as turbulence.
Posted by: Jim Klein | Jan 24, 2008 5:42:06 PM
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