It's Easter, and it seems to be a day for posting poems. How is this related to chronic illness? Perhaps in three ways: first, I can no longer imagine going to the beach and waking along the strand - my activities are so truncated by MS that I feel claustrophobic from it; second, we still care about the world even though we are limited in various ways in our interaction; and third, we feel like so much flotsam and jetsam sometimes, the detritus left behind while others zoom ahead, pursuing life at its fullest. Hence, this poem:
I
inherited a piece of jetsam from my grandfather Harold C. Palmer, who found it
on Cape Cod, near Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Jetsam
He walked along seaweed
strewn sand,
reshaped by winter’s waves and the spume of
the cold, salted tide.
Horseshoe crab shells
danced abandoned;
the water rocked a mottled brown carapace,
inhabiting it like a ghost.
Among the black mollusks
and white clam shells,
he saw bits of beach glass - green, brown or
rare and cherished blue,
sanded smooth by endless tumbling in the
abrasive Atlantic.
He bent to pick up a piece
or two, a habit formed in childhood.
Today, he did not pocket
the speckled and muted
evidence of man’s existence, but cast them
back upon the beach.
On this grey and spattered
day, he sought other treasure -
the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck.
The S. S. Portland had gone
down with all hands;
distant cousins out of Maine lost to him forever.
There would be no unpacking
the last suitcase,
no delving through wallets for well-creased
and folded letters from loved ones,
no reverent opening of dark red
leather-encased photos to view
hazy images of those who were held
dearest by the ones who died.
All that they carried with
them in grey pin-striped vest pockets
or shiny, black, glass-beaded bags
was captured by the deep,
locked with their corpses behind a reef so
dangerous
the wreck was never to be dived upon
during his lifetime.
The wind whipped through
his navy woolen pea coat,
the spray drenched him, leaving him chilled
and sticky with salt.
He turned to make his way
back to the lighthouse, leaning into the wind,
lifting his hand to his brow and looking
down, away from the wet gusts;
As often seemed to happen
when he had given up hope,
his eyes lit upon a dark brown corner
protruding
from a mound of pebbles and weeds.
Picking it up, peeling off
the slimy tangled kelp,
he wiped clean the cast iron face of a eight-inch
wide plate.
On the curved face of it,
in raised letters, was the simple word “AXE.”
It had once been mounted on
the wall, perhaps near the engine room,
and held a sharpened fire axe ready for the
possibility of a blaze.
The crew need never fear
the boiler again;
need never worry over the chance they might
have to chop away
burning beams, dumping them overboard,
while loading panicked passengers into
lifeboats,
just in case the ship was going down.
No flame would ever again
burn in the engine room
or the water-logged timbers of the S.S.
Portland.
He took the axe holder home
and, with a shaking hand,
wrote “S.S. Portland” on a manila tag.
Then, tying it carefully
with pale cotton string
to the mounting hole in the upper right
corner,
he laid the ship to rest.
© Kit Minden
