Steamship
I couldn’t find the pier. It was hidden somewhere along the trembling edge of my cold town. It was out of sight, beyond my reach and all the while the boat was waiting. I lost my way among dizzy streets, crisscross straight or winding out but no wharf in sight whichever way I turned. Time had run, and it was now certain that I would miss the boat. I would be left behind while the great ship propelled resolute toward deep water, farther away with each passing moment.
No steamship to take me where I needed to go. I thought I saw it retreat from the infirm pier but that vision rose and fell only in my mind’s eye. In fact, I was nowhere near that boat when it left but I could feel it pull away from the land the very moment the lines were hauled in and coiled like gold ringlets upon the deck and the whole of it slowly drew away in search of open sea. And though I had never seen that boat, I knew that it was meant for me. I was born to be in it, on it, part of it, so it seems to me.
It was a steamship of the old sort, one of the great boats of a dying breed: sleek and fast, tall stacks and high decks, name blazoned in large white letters across either side of the bow. It had been built by men who were desperate for something to revere, some means to leave the land, some way to be a part of the sea or part of the night that they would scour with giant searchlights that would cross the sky with long wands of light that wavered back and forth like the arms of some incandescent metronome. This was their way of searching, yearning, needing, seeking, engaging in holy mission.
The deep-throated horn would bellow loud and all would hear that clarion call as ships left port and slid easy atop the green slate sea and blue smoke overflowed those mammoth stacks and climbed the lattice sky, slowly turning grey, then white, then lingering in air, hanging from the heights like dangling threads, trailing behind, dissipating, fading out until they were gone. Those boats churned the water, steel-sided, heavy buoyant, old alive, riding high like a coach-and-four through a concourse they carved through the rolling surface of the seething water. They routed the water along straight lines and were so large that they could hardly have been imagined back in those ancient days when the sea always had the final word. Their hulls were perfect and imposing and they slipped easily through storm after storm, defying winds and waves, rushing fast forward like some winged holy venture. They ran at speeds we can’t imagine today and they wouldn’t slow or stop until they had reached the faraway shore. There was nothing to hold them back and they roved the ocean unimpeded.
Their grandeur was deeply ingrained in thick grey steel. They wore their colors like simple suits, red and black and each side etched with a perfect white waterline that cut straight across as if seared by some holy brand. Their masts would rise up out of the sea, high above the deck and would glisten like long, righteous swords that reflected angular shafts of light that would cut through the salt air like the beams of light that God sends crashing through stained glass on Sunday: that same hard, true light that sifts through men’s dreams so that those who sleep can see the life they are denied in the course of a day.
Such a boat had been berthed in wait for me and such a boat would have carried me along but it left the wharf without me. Now it runs from me with increasing speed and is many miles, countless miles, from the small scrap of ground upon which I stand, purposeless, my temporal skin and transitory thoughts stacked like loops of rope in a pile upon the dusty posts of my weak legs.
I was left behind and lost. I was just another casualty and I simply retreated. As I did, I had a vision: I saw life in all its forms: life winding through houses, huts, tents and buildings, wide forests and long deserts, all of it at once, all life that lived within and on the earth, all that breathed, all mortal things. I saw the great multitude all at once, a huge bevy spinning all so fast, like trembling life, life on the fly, a swirling carousel. The highest buildings spun, faster, faster, wouldn’t stop, and the fields spun and so did the lakes and mountains and the frozen snow. The whole world spun upside down, in every direction, and picked up speed, and I knew my world, once so still and somnambulic, would never be the same. It would now be one that could only spin too fast, too hard, too harsh, too cruel, up and down and lost in the mass of a jumble and all of it would be thrown and fall and fly about like leaves in the windy corner. All those earthly things that I once knew turned sharp and cold, all in a splutter and everything and all spun like rotors in motion, too fast to be understood by a single set of eyes. Buildings spinning like dancing bricks: it makes no sense unless you see it. Spinning fast like a turnabout clock, a broken basket of life in a box, twisted inhuman, as fast as the wings of a hummingbird and brittle like marbles in a bag thrown high and dropped, falling hard and all those people chipped and cracked like broken marbles, each against the other, damaged and disconsolate.
And so the flowers spun, and the yellow petals of sober daisies circled round like eyelet stars, paper sharp propellers on the wing and, oh, those trees were cruel. Their branches jutted out, cutting edges, inhuman consequence like a rip saw at work, dangerously close like a meteoric storm: those blades were sharp and angry and voracious. The birds spun too, upside down, above my head as well. They flew in flocks that wandered and weaved in circles in air, denied a place to land. The world was a spinning storm, lost in a throbbing cyclone, dancing against its will in every conceivable direction.
I was the one who couldn’t spin. I just wobbled scared, like the last stalk of wheat in a barren field, completely lost this time: no water, wharf, road, or tunnel but knowing, now, that an ancient edifice had come and gone and never would it come again.
I thought I saw the last traces of smoke rising toward the floor of heaven but, no matter what I saw, a vessel bolts like a fugitive through the thrashing sea at ungodly speed and will soon be too far away to remember. It breaks across unchartered water like a plow through virgin ground while I am left behind. I bide my time upon the broken bric-a-brac in a world that spins around me. I have no rail upon which to lean, no floating ring onto which to cling but all the while I am falling over, tripping into ceilings that once were floors. I am abandoned for all the time that I have left, knowing now that I will never see the rippled water and steamy waves and ancient oceans and curved rivers and all those silent lakes that lie beneath the land, estuaries warm and infinite, waters known or waiting to be found.