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100 TRINA GAYNON Some Stars Are Not Used for Navigation On the bay, the waters stir as the sun goes down, stones along the shore beaten by the tide and the pine windbreak beaten by the rising winds, and the sailors who fished at the world’s edge all day, surrender their boats to the dusky waves as gulls surrender their wings to the dusk sky. He waits for still waters and a star-marked sky, lingers over beer and sandwiches, the sails down. The fear of his own freedom out here hits him in waves. There are enough hard-boiled detective books below to tide him over until the endless mirror of the open ocean can edge him into madness, where portholes are windows and hatches are doors and the endless sea winds, around the boat like a lawn out to meet the sky, offers him a cool place to lie on the edge of death until he tires of swimming and slips down to become bloated flotsam on a rising tide, a lighter gravity riding the waves. A last fishing trawler motors by; sailors wave at him, their yellow slickers pulled tight against wind and spray, as their prow bounces on the tide. They are mostly shadow and light against a sky no longer pink with the glow of a smog-filtered sundown. With the trawler, night has come over the world’s edge. He finishes his after-dinner pipe, moves back from the edge, packs away fear and freedom, as waves become quiet and the wind settles down. He decides it is time to head home and rewinds the ropes that hold him still beneath the sky. He wants no more lonely rising and ebbing of tides that leave his mind a vortex of flood tides. From now on he’ll race, on the edge of competition, sails tight against a sunny sky, a crew to stand with him before the waves, a crew to stand and shelter him from the winds, to help him haul the canvas up and down. He rides high on the tide. His motor skims the waves as ahead and to his right the edge of the shoreline unwinds before his eyes, and stars in the sky begin to rain down. ...

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