HE CAME HOME ONE DAY

He came home one day
With such a strange gift
His mother had moved
And my father had helped her
Things must Go
They weigh you down

He gave me the glass boat and said:
It belonged to your grandfather
The grandfather who’d been at sea
Years on an oil tanker
The Captain I never knew
My father’s words were few
And he meant no disrespect

The awe I ought to have felt was 
Flattened by my narrowing eyes
Eyes that sought flaws and 
Could seldom recognize
A beauty that was clean
Something that was pure
Pure as the lines of a boat

Why was the boat not in a bottle?
That‘s how they come: ships-in-a-bottle
How I wronged this glass boat
So unseemly to my eyes
Not made of wood and too large for a bottle
It seemed rightly placed in a whole other world

‘Twas a sailing ship,
A schooner-bark
With lowered sails
Three proud masts
And an endless prow
Pointing to the sky
All glass—as delicate as
Barely frozen icicles and
Smartly showcased in more glass
Ensconced in a lidded aquarium
Sides taped together by silver foil
And quivering on the ege of disaster
I felt fearful whenever I moved it

Inside, there were cellophane waves
Unattached, moving like ice floes
Whose pieces were rigid but
Shifted slightly whenever the
Glass case was lifted —
A swaying of the seas

I became fond of this boat
But in my careless hands
It slowly fell apart and ten years later
Glass case giving way
At the silver foil seams
The cellophane waves spilled out
And I gave little thought to
What I was seeing
Or what it might mean:
Bored with the boat
I threw it away—after all:
You can‘t bring a glass boat to college

A lifetime later, well past
My Century‘s close
And the glass boat‘s demise
I saw the photo, the Hurley photo:
The Endurance: taken at night
Frozen in Antarctic waters
Crushed and trapped in the ice
Unconsciously I apprehended
My grandfather‘s boat of glass
Too familiar it seemed
This archetypal scene

I mourned a loss and
I mourned my disrespect
Forever in search of true words
To open unseeing eyes