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    Day Sailing
    Day Sailing
    Day Sailing
    Ebook93 pages45 minutes

    Day Sailing

    By David R. Slavitt

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    About this ebook

    This volume of poetry illustrates a new side of the author of The Carnivore and Suits for the Dead. The wit, the toughness, the shining lyric clarity of the earlier books are still here, but they have been joined by a quiet understanding, a joyfulness, and an acceptance of things as they are that indicates the poet has moved into a new and most exciting period.

    Originally published in 1969.

    A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2018
    ISBN9781469644189
    Day Sailing

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      Book preview

      Day Sailing - David R. Slavitt

      I

      DAY SAILING

      1.

      Distance deceives. Novelists mistake

      extent for weight, their thicknesses

      for acuity. Endurance rarely

      endures. Chichester, Bannister,

      Sisyphus sweat. Lazier,

      I cannot believe that far,

      go to no such lengths.

      Day sailing in a small catboat in the bay

      satisfies me, who have nowhere to go.

      What rarity have the Indies now

      but famine, cholera and war,

      what riches for a new Magellan

      or Drake to take from that arduous route?

      The Pacific boils with testing;

      Atlantis is long sunk.

      Still, the mainsheet tugs,

      tiller and centerboard purr.

      The wind blows the hair.

      I go sailing.

      2.

      It is conversation of craft and force,

      the wind so, and the sail and rudder so;

      it is compromise between the wind

      and me, a settling for that bluff, that flagpole,

      and tacking back, beating up the wind,

      achieving direction out of indirection;

      it is balancing, my weight

      to windward, heeling to leeward;

      it is a triumph, for civilization is

      neither writing, nor painting pictures, nor forging metal,

      nor breeding animals, nor sowing grain,

      but sailing into the wind, sailing to westward,

      the knowing, the craft.

      The cove at low tide

      swarms, gulls and terns,

      sandpipers, and crows

      pick over the shingle,

      small crabs start,

      clams squirt, worms

      snake in the rich reek

      of sea-wrack rot.

      The muck smacks soles,

      oozes between my toes.

      I bring to the hull a cloth, a plank, a stick,

      and bring the hull to life, and it brings me

      off the shingle, into the narrow channel,

      and out into the bay. The fetor fades

      to salt. The wind freshens.

      I have my craft—a skill, a trade, duplicity,

      a small boat.

      3.

      The intricate maneuvering for the sake

      of maneuvering, or to put myself in the sun

      for my tan, or out of the sun for fear of burn,

      or just to adjust the look of the boat is not

      different from our comfortable lives ashore,

      neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy,

      except that sometimes when a fresh wind comes up

      out of nowhere, out of the south, and I

      have to head south to the cove, and the spray breaks

      over the bow, and the boat slants, riding, riving

      the water, comes about sharp, smart, to find

      that it is, I am, seaworthy is something.

      I am no sailor, but there is no virtue

      wholly irrelevant. The seaman with the oar

      must find the farmer willing to improvise

      some use for what he carries, able to see

      it could make do, perhaps, as a winnowing fan.

      PRECAUTIONS

      The twin red pennants of gale warnings drooped

      in the dead calm air. Alma, the radio said,

      was off Atlantic City: still, the harbor

      was still and the air. A mosquito looped

      in triumph over the wind of his small will

      in virtuoso passes about my head.

      I hauled the boat ashore. It was heavy labor.

      My boots were heavy. Everything was still

      as an impasto landscape not yet dry,

      or, if reports be true, as Alma’s eye.

      I stripped the boat, carried the spars to a bluff

      above the reach of any tide. Their varnish

      soaked up the sun like syrup, and the sweat

      poured down my back like syrup. Good enough.

      I dug the anchor into the mud and left

      the storm to do its worst, thinking the swinish

      weekenders whose boats rode light would get

      the wrecks they deserved, spars snapped, their craft adrift

      in gale force winds to founder. I drove home

      to wait for the weather reports, and the weather to come.

      That night it rained some, and the wind rose

      but only a little. Eight on the black nine,

      and still no storm, or storm but out to sea.

      Seven on the eight. I went to bed. All those

      boats of the careless

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