My Ship is Sailing

There is a lovely tune I first heard sung by a Cuban on the beach at Mazatlan, the summer of ’71. The chorus goes something like, “Wait a little, just a little bit longer, before you take away my happiness.” At first I thought it was just your usual crooning, but then I figured out from the title it was someone addressing his own memory.

La Nave del Olvido. The Ship of Forgetting.

My ship is sailing. I am losing the past, and it’s eating away the present. I slip down as in quicksand. I am young again. I am in the back of a vehicle driven by a man with a woman at his side.

They are utterly indifferent. No affect at all. She removes a pistol, one of those shining nickel and silver numbers patrician women might carry. She brings it out to no purpose, and it sort of hangs there in our presence.

I am able to secure the weapon, and I hide it. In a matter of moments the lady and I are in bed.

She is attractive as a mannequin can be. She shows no effects from sleeping with me, but I am much troubled. The night is ending. I’m not 18 come dawn.

I worry. Will this regression end my happy day life as a satisfied senior citizen? Will Niki J leave me? After all, this event of last night happened many years ago.

I hurry as best I can, through the night, down all the years, to a dubious dawn.

Carved in Stone

I am following a path carved in stone, specifically the granite along the peaks of a mountain range. I have one of those toys which will create music as you wave it, and I do that, worrying that perhaps the train of monks whose trail my own will shortly intersect might be disturbed. We are all seekers in these hills.

My mechanical chime looks like a lantern and it’s at the end of my staff and I wave it and wailing results. The file of Hindu pilgrims makes not a sound, even of footsteps. They merely trudge forward as if through cloud, each of them like the others. I see them slightly below my own rut carved in stone perpendicular to theirs, from slightly above.

I walk and I wave my lantern chime and the wail is all the sound there is.