Issue Thirty-Six - Summer 2020

Advanced Lesson of Boats

By Gary Thompson

in memory of Joe Lewis, Juryrigger

Land is where the dog pees,
the crew rests their achy
sea legs, and the boat is hauled
for new bottom paint. Land is good.

But when it suddenly rises
beneath the bow, the depth alarm
screeches and the skipper skips
breathing, his eyes fixed

on numbers dropping
on the sounder, the crew bracing
for a crash. Wouldn’t it be good to stop
time? Better to go back

to safe water, that primordial deep
that was paradise. Better yet,
if our ancestors never crawled out of there,
scooted off on all fours, stood up

on two shaky feet. Best,
we never invented the boat?

Copyright Thompson 2020

Gary Thompson 's fifth book, ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER, is a collection of six lyrical sequences. For many years, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at CSU, Chico. Now he and his wife live on San Juan Island, where he spends an inordinate amount of time "simply messing about in" an old trawler named Keats. This is the title poem for a sequence, "Invent the Boat" from his (not a) new manuscript.

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