What men dwell on when they go to sea...
JAWS (for Officer Brody)
We’re gonna need a bigger boat…
is what I say to Phyl… us, surrounded
by the circus of breaching leviathans, fantails
wider than the Orca’s deck on this whale watch
I swore she’d never drag me on after twice reading
Moby Dick and watching Jaws a few too many times
(if that’s possible)…
her seeing me as The Clown, my familiar humor
only a fleeting distraction— my sole purpose on earth:
keeping this woman in smiles— but me, seriously
identifying with Jaws' hydrophobic Brody, me weak
in the knees with vertigo at the thought of
twenty thousand leagues of watery grave looming
below us and patiently trolling the surface… waiting on
Ol’ Man Gravity to reel us down… and so, humor being
my best coping skill, like whistling through the cemetery
at midnight, I kill both gulls with one stone, leaning
into her as we brace for the next swell on rubbery
sea legs, and me plucking the invisible Chesterfield
out of my mug and crushing it under the toe of my
boat shoe while muttering in my best Bogart…
When this tub goes belly-up, kid, shtick with me, see?
I got us a plan. “And what’s the big plan, Ahab?”
Party balloons, shweetheart… “Party balloons?”
That’s right, beautiful: I’m packin’— The way I see it,
when this floating coffin rolls over, I give you half, see?
That’s when we start blowin’em up ‘n stuffin’ our shirts…
But sudden flukes slap surf off the starboard and
I lose her to the spectacle--
so I, too, marvel for a while…
secretly fingering that very
real packet of red, green,
yellow and blue birthday
balloons nesting in
my jacket pocket...
