Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18-year-old who’d never really read a book through, to the life that can be found in them. —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.
Narraganset Evening Walk to the Base Library
Bay to my right (my rite of road and sea)
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line.
I hold to its shoulder, I sail, I walk the line.
The bay moved as I moved, but in retrograde
as if the way I moved had something to do
with the way the black bay moved, how it tracked,
how it perfectly matched my pace, but
slipping behind, opposed, relative
—Albert would have a formula or two
to spin about this if he were here.
to spin about this if he were here.
Behind too, over my shoulder, my steel grey ship at pier,
transfigured in cloud of cool white light
spraying from lamps on tall poles ashore,
and aboard, from lamps on mast tops and yards
among needles of antennae gleaming above its
raked stack in electric cloud, enmeshed
in photon aura, its edges feathered into night,
enveloped as it lay upon shimmering skin of bay.
enveloped as it lay upon shimmering skin of bay.
From here, she’s as still as the thought from which she came:
upheld steel on water arrayed in light, heavy as weight, sheer
as a bubble, the line of pier etched clean, keen as a
horizon knife, library ahead, ship at night behind.
The bay to my right, as I said, slid dark
at the confluence of all nights,
the lights of low barracks and tall offices
of the base ahead all aimed west skipped off bay
each of its trillion tribulations jittering at lightspeed
fractured by bay’s breeze-moiled black surface
in splintered sight.
in splintered sight.
Ahead the books I aimed to read,
books I’d come to love since Tony & Ed,
in the generosity of their own fresh enlightenment
had teamed to bring new tools to this greenhorn’s
stymied brain, springing its self-locked latch,
to let in fresh air crisp as this breeze
blowing across a bay from here to everywhere,
troubling Narragansett from then to
me here now.
me here now.
Jim Culleny
12/16/19 Rev. 3/2/25
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