A Sail to Great Island

After Watching Twyla Tharp

72 After Watching Twyla Tharp The curled leaves are struggling into green, and from green into fullness. Trees that cast speckled shade soon will cast black shadows. At night I dream the moment in my boat when I cast off the mooring pennant and motor out through the green arms of the land onto the dazzling, free-form water, rising with each tide as my wife’s side rises with each breath beneath the covers at night. I think of the brain prickling with the tiny pin-point lights of the day like phosphorescent seaweed in the dark. It needs a flood to carry it into sleep, the way the world needs sun for two or three days for all the buds to open. We wake, blink, and everything’s green with spring, the way the body, sick for a month, rises one morning as comfortable with itself as if the flesh were cool silk. If the movement feels good to do, then probably it looks good to others. Wearing my flesh lightly I kneel to press the kill switch on the motor and the boat keeps bubbling forward inside the wind as if it doesn’t know any better, has forgotten its mass, its iron keels—bubbling forward, at a slight heel, bow foaming—and where is the mind in all this? Like a small passenger on board the body which follows its will, which is also the will of the wind. From land you’ll see the white sail’s progress against the curve of Great Island, slow but inexorable, the way the tide darkens the sand, or the way clouds drift floating south. The tip of the sail is like the pointer on a gauge, which says time is filling up with life till it’s full, the way the sail is full, and begins to move. Somewhere. Be patient. Enjoy the feeling of this flesh. 73 The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry The University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series Ronald Wallace, General Editor Now We’re Getting Somewhere ❖ David Clewell Henry Taylor, Judge, 1994 The Legend of Light ❖ Bob Hicok Carolyn Kizer, Judge, 1995 Fragments in Us: Recent and Earlier Poems ❖ Dennis Trudell Philip Levine, Judge, 1996 Don’t Explain ❖ Betsy Sholl Rita Dove, Judge, 1997 Mrs. Dumpty ❖ Chana Bloch Donald Hall, Judge, 1998 Liver ❖ Charles Harper Webb Robert Bly, Judge, 1999 Ejo ❖ Derick Burleson Alicia Ostriker, Judge, 2000 Borrowed Dress ❖ Cathy Colman Mark Doty, Judge, 2001 Ripe ❖ Roy Jacobstein Edward Hirsch, Judge, 2002 The Year We Studied Women ❖ Bruce Snider Kelly Cherry, Judge, 2003 A Sail to Great Island ❖ Alan Feldman Carl Dennis, Judge, 2004 ...