Friday
I have fallen in love with the poetry of Helen Mitsios, which I discovered after learning that she will be journeying to Sewanee next week to conduct a workshop and give a reading. The poem that I am sharing —and that I also shared today in my Sewanee Mountain Messenger poetry column—seems at first glance to be seasonally inappropriate, given how the weather has suddenly turned chilly here. But some of us may find ourselves wistfully looking back at summer as the poem’s speaker looks back at a beach excursion decades earlier:
Summer
We stared at the ocean because
it was there like an empty box
or an instrument we never learned
to play. Sand drops and cocoa butter
convex on your skin, worn flip flops
dangling through drifting days
of popsicle sticks and body boards
ready to circumnavigate the world.
Static on the old transistor radio,
the click track of drums between
goose bumps and long walks
on the beach where you smoked
weed rolled with tobacco.
We found a perfect shell
then tossed it back thinking
there would always be another.
In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.
Tiny details help us date the poem—the reference to transistor radios makes me think it is set in the 1960s or early 1970s—and the speaker seems to be in the flush of young love. Unpromising trivia, which at other times might detract from the magic, instead seem to enhance it: sand particles and cocoa butter on the skin, worn flip-flops, popsicle sticks, radio static. Such is new love that everything seems possible: boxes are there to be filled, instruments to be played. The speaker even imagines that she could circumnavigate the world on a bodyboard, and she thinks it’s okay to jettison a perfect shell. After all, there will always be another.
Yet although everything seems perfect—or perhaps because everything seems perfect—she senses that everything is about to end. At least that’s how I read the final lines, which land like a thunderbolt:
In the corner of my eye,
I saw your ghost ship set sail.
Something is leaving and, while it doesn’t yet have a person aboard—after all, he’s right there with the speaker—some part of him seems of be departing, just as some part of her can see it happening. I think of the opening line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”
Who knows whether the speaker will ever find another perfect seashell or experience another such day. Fortunately, something perfect will remain. The memory.
Further thought: For some reason, an Audre Lorde poems comes to mind when I read Mitsios’s poem, perhaps because it also occurs on a beach and is also about a perfect moment that is about to come to an end. Strength, Lorde suggests in “The Seventh Sense,” lies in hoping and building, even in the face of seemingly inevitable destruction. Strong men who live this attract strong women who live this.
The Seventh Sense
Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sandcastles
by the rising sea
