The ship at sea

Last evening I heard Mark Strand read in a living room by the Hudson River. This was happenstance. Not the river nor Strand--but my being there. I was working in the apartment; it's a job I've had for ten years now.


After hours, below stairs.


When I arrived, Mark Strand was already in the living room by the floor-to-ceiling windows--and there are floor-to-ceiling windows all around the apartment, with views of the water and the lights and the cars and all that is beautiful in the city. When viewed through glass, the city is always beautiful.


Mark Strand is imposing, immense, even in his frailty. His voice, once strong, is thin. He speaks as he moves: slowly, picking his way as though avoiding loose stones. He read like a ship at sea: steady onward, turning slowly, leaving all stirred in his wake.


When he read his new poems--which he does not call poems because they are written in prose, as sentences--he sat on the linen-colored sofa, a yellow lab at his side. [This dog, who lives in the apartment, knows instinctively which is the premier position in any setting.] There were hushed silences, nearly prayerful, supplicants at the feet of the knowing. His new book, to be released on 3 January 2012, is called Almost Invisible. The next, Strand says, will be called Invisible.


The dog slept.


This is a poem from twenty-one years ago that Strand wrote, but did not read.


The Idea

For us, too, there was a wish to possess

Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,

Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless

In which we might see ourselves; and this desire

Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold

That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,

And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,

And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,

Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white

Among false curves and hidden erasures;

And never once did we feel we were close

Until the night wind said, “Why do this,

Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;”

And there appeared , with its windows glowing, small,

In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;

And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,

And would have gone forward and opened the door,

And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,

But that it was ours by not being ours,

And should remain empty. That was the idea.

[His voice is here.]


The dog slept until applause broke into the room, and then he sat up, assured that it was for him.

The Ferry from Tripoli

It has been a long time away. One could think of it as a kind of voyage, but it's really more a case of distraction, of not fully being present in any way.

I've been trying to follow the stories coming from the Middle East; my own awareness started with a Facebook post, a plea from a friend who asked, why was no American media reporting about Egypt? And, then, in a day, that changed, as every day began with DATELINE, CAIRO. 


Last week, I was transfixed with the story about the ferry that had been chartered by the United States to take its citizens and other foreigners to Malta. People had been fleeing all week; the airports were jammed. Tens of thousands of workers were boarding flights out of Libya. And yet, for me, it was the rough sea voyage that seemed to capture all that was mythic and horrifying. 


Two days waiting at port for the waters to calm down. An eight-hour journey across rough waters. Hundreds disembarking at a distant port, dragging their luggage, exhausted and triumphant and heartbroken. Each American interviewed said they would return to Libya as soon as possible.


There are so many other migrations, mostly undocumented, likely more dangerous. We only tend to hear about the Americans who lived and died; all others slip into history unknown. 


For me, the whole concept of flight, of fleeing, is deeply impressed upon me. It's an inheritance; it feels like a part of my body, like the particular shape of my fingers or the nature of my gait. Tao nan. To flee a calamity or a burden. I have friends who fled their homes, usually at night, often as children. Bundled into cars and then ships and then planes to faraway places that were not home when they woke up. My mother fled within her own country, which was vast enough to be another continent when she woke up one day and had stopped moving.


So the notion of a ferry sailing from a port in Tripoli--which instead sounds so poetic, like embarking on a love affair--is really another print made from a long-ago negative. People fleeing from madness and a firestorm, people setting off in the night into an unknown because all other, probably preferable, choices have been exhausted. Unlike most people who flee, the ones on the ferry from Tripoli will have options, and the place from which they fled was not their ancestral homeland. That landscape does not quite have the same imprint on the heart, and its vanishing does not evoke the same loss.