Well, that ain’t exactly what this should be titled: “At Sea.” But that is where i am at. Lost. Even feeling alone. i have vowed not to write about it, not to talk about it (except with Maureen; it seems we can’t avoid it), not to do anything about it, if anything until i get my head around it, because i’m torn between family and friends taking up their shillelagh’s on the lines they’ve drawn so they demonstrate their fear and hate before…oops, i wasn’t going to write about it.

So what i’ve being doing is revisiting things i found important to me in the past. Memories. It occurred to me i have more memories (and more experience) with the things in vogue to be fixed…oops, again. i found this one on torn out pages of a wheel book. You know what Navy folks used for a brain before fancy notebooks guiding you through the items and giving you dates and stuff  and requiring you to place a priority on every thing you wrote down, and before such magnificent automatic tell you about it tracking came with the computer directing you how you should keep track of events and actions required and who should do what to whom, but back when you actually had to think for yourself about what was important and write it down to remember. i remember, but this i found when it fell out of a folder i was shuffling did not have to-do stuff. It had a poem, written in 1970 as i was concluding my tour as executive office of the transport unit on USNS ships carrying Korean troops to Nam and back (yeh, yeh, i know i mention that a lot but it was a very significant year of my life and oh, oh, how things changed that year).

i thought i had published it before, somewhere, sometime, somehow. But i can’t find it. Old man frustration. So…

one hundred miles at sea
this morning,
i saw a gull,
flapping white
against the cold harsh rays
of the East China Sea winter sun
and
tremelo wind;
whitest gull i’ve ever seen,
out of how many thousand
i wonder;
the gull was captured
in a prism of time
from which i shall soon escape
and
then watch the mockingbirds.