Old Man and Sea

Poetry by Naomi Swinton
Linebreaks by Glenn Buttkus


Stolen Poem

Early Naomi but still a fave. It is sometimes hard to get back to poetry if one is really good at grant writing, speaking, facilitation and training, strategic planning, community organizing and the like. But sometimes I wonder who is more likely to move the world, the community organizer, or the poet?

Rick Mobbs


Old Man and Sea

Old Man comes back from the sea
ready for hot baths
and baseball on the radio
ready for a companion,
not too much company,
likes perishable foods and souffles.

He sits on the porch
and plays with the dial
Doesn’t see the sun up or down,
just the stadiums broadcast
from Chicago, New York, Seattle
The crack of the bat on ball
and the stands full of fans

He won’t drink beer anymore,
reminds him too
much of the fish.
Likes the Chinese take out
3 miles away,
if he times it right
he can get egg foo young
and only miss half an inning.

Laundry needs to be
done, so do the taxes,
though really,
does the government
give a damn about him?
He dreams of water, swallowing
up the ocean
and the world it contains
in his belly.
He snores and starts when he wakes,
wondering at the
steadiness of the bed.

His skin gets pale,
and his legs
a little skinnier.
In August
a navy buddy passes through
on a visit,
travelling with a widowed sister-in-law.
They all get along fine,
but it is the announcers
who keep the Old Man’s attention,
who make his mind jump
and his body remember
youth.

Sun on the face and shoulders
of that young body,
a craving for details and description,
an inability to rest and wait,
a hunger and speed and desire
he can watch now like a movie

but which eludes him,
doesn’t want to be him anymore.
He loved words
when he first got
a sense of himself,
loved the names of things,
the making of sense
and object
and relationship
where before was just being.
The great being
of the sea
made words small nonsense, but

just the same
he always took poetry with him
to read to the waves.
Poetry and baseball
and sex and restaurants:
what else do we have
to rudder with,
what other anchors
have made peace in modernity?

He has another smoke.
The need for words
to recognize, to say, to populate
and mark.
The craving for understanding
and pattern and history,
and wanting grandchildren
without children,
stories without endings,
menus and maps without meals
or direction.

The sea comes up to his bed
at night
and the fish are swimming on
without him,
no one else catches them
any more.
They are happy
he has baseball
and aftershave commercials
and they want him
to feel rich and virile
without working his nets,
without the salt
and sand
and stretch of early days
spent fishing.
They don’t say anything
and his dreams
usually turn to port,
to farmland,
to hardware,
somewhere else,

somewhere he hasn’t been
and won’t be going,
something he isn’t.
He closes up the porch
and his house
and pulls on boots
and leaves in October,
walks and then rides a bus
to New York City,
rents a room at the
Methodist Yachtsman’s Hostel
and says hello
to the fellows at the bar.

He buys a baseball hat
and shirt
and logs on to sail for Amsterdam but
finds himself instead
up all night gambling
and then in a car with
a woman driving to Fort lauderdale,
listening to shag music
on the radio and
stopping to pee
behind gas stations
and eating steak and potatoes once

a day at chain restaurants
that get cheaper
the farther South they go.
He’s drawing down his pension
but who cares.
Baseball is between
him and this woman,
there isn’t much else to talk about,
the words he had
when he was at sea
don’t come into play very much here.

Who ever heard of Neruda,
who wouldn’t laugh
if he started to describe his love
for the green structure of leaves
revealed by an easy tear
but then magnified
by the scale and pattern of trees,
his anger with the taxi drivers who
spoke so many more languages
than he could
and seemed to him like urban

sailors with words available,
part of the trade,
it made him jealous and sad,
what use were poems
for a divorced woman
with three kids she didn’t
know where
and clothes that fit okay,
lipstick that she liked
and a matter
of fact plan for everything,
from rest stops
to handling strangers to

arriving alive
on the other side.
Poems were better kept private;
you couldn’t tune them in
on the radio
and shut out the rest of the
world and share the excitement
of 100,000 others
breathing and watching
what will the pitch be
how will they call it
what word is next to truly say
how it is
to make us remember this moment
forever.
No chance, no
dice, better to just drive
and leave the rest behind.
Once they arrived in
Florida they said goodbye
after she took him to a hotel
and he sat
listening to the radio,
fully dressed
and uninterested in her lying

naked in bed.
She owed him fifty dollars
for gas in the end but what
did he care,
really, the trip was a bargain,
he walked out doors and
looked at the little lizards
running up the white wall.
She reminded him
of circus people,
funny but very practical,
hard hit but always moving.

The quiet knowledge of words
and sea
wouldn’t leave him alone,
he couldn’t just see and breathe
his mind made rhythms
and questions and names and rhymes
and just kept holding on
when his heart couldn’t do it,
never had,
it was the words he loved
but nothing else satisfied,
why had he taken them all to sea all
alone?

A whole life spent
with tides and stanzas
and now a waiting
with no breaks, no meter,
innings and half time
and batter up
just a long enough substitute
to help him forget
what he wanted
so he could get on
with the eating and sleeping
still on his plate.

Some sports might have the complexity
and assurance of words,
the predictability and surprise
of the sea,
the hope and naivete of poems,
but he hadn’t found them yet.
The farm teams let him watch,
and he stayed on for the season.

naomi swinton