The Pilgrim Island

Step into the boat now

The Pilgrim Island

Step into the boat now,
and feel the swell of water
beneath the boards.

The boatman
wants you
to join him,
and to sit
looking forward
with your
back to him,
to take both those
polished oars
in your hands
and feel the sea.

Here everything
is all movement
and a giving up
to the never-ending

rhythm of the ocean,
here the apprenticeship
is to the coming and going

of horizons
now below you
now above you
now beyond you.

The air is keen,
the green seas
immense in their arrival.

In the small
windblown boat
that seems like you,
it’s understood
you might want
to be anywhere
but on the way
to where you
first thought
you wanted
to go.

Your thoughts
fretting and
fixated
over your shoulder
across the windblown
straight
to a landing
on that pilgrim island
cradled in the West.

But
the boatman
knows his art
and you can feel
the ease
with which he lifts
and falls with
the sea

the way each dip
of the oars
generates its

own circle
sent back home
through the water,

the way he makes
you familiar again
with all the rising
and the falling
you’ve ever done
and all of it
that’s still to come,

so that when
you finally
fill your lungs
with the gifted air
and lift
the wooden oars
like grown wings

it’s like settling
into a unison
with your own breath
at last

it’s like coming home
to the tide flowing
in every cell
of your own hands

it’s as if your arms
and shoulders
circling the oars

were the
blood-beat
of your own

movement through
the body of
a tidal world.

It took you
so many years
to credit
the miracle light,
though it always
faithfully
made its difficult way
toward you.

It took you so long
to see the way
understanding rises
from the very center
of your own body
everyday and luminous,
from arriving waves
of what only seems
like the ordinary.

But you know now
the strength
of those arms
you were given,
you know now
the immensity
of the forces
coming and going
in your own tidal heart,
the way you have always
been the current
and the great sea
moving through,
always the one
able to somehow
give and receive
always the one looking
for something
to call you on
amidst all
the difficult calls
of the living
and the dying.

That pilgrim island
in the end,
just a brief passage
away,
just the other
side of a short sentence
or a sweet
blank page,
just a dab of paint
on the waiting canvas,
waiting
for you,

sometimes
like a patient lover,
other times
like a future life
unable to be still,
stealing from its past
a brief kiss
from your
unsuspecting self.

Through it all,
the island always
floating,
like an invitational
outline in the
dazzling light,

one you
know so well now,
your pen
cradled by your hand

like the polished wood
of a banked oar,

an island, you
are glad to say,

as you sit
surrounded by light
looking out to the
west,
and setting to your
work,

you could be
out to, and
back from,
in a short day.


- from Still Possible

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