10.17.03 - 6:03 p.m.

Parts of a poem I started thinking about after reading some ferry disaster coverage yesterday:

We're launched into the darkness,
half a load of late passengers
gliding onto the indefinite
black surface, a few lights vague

and shimmering on the island shore.

Twelve minutes,
precisely, the night ferry hurries

across the lake. And what happens
is always the body of water,
its skin like the wrong side of satin.
I love to stand like this,

where the prow pushes blunt into the future,
knowing, more than seeing, how
the surface rushes and doesn't break
but simply slides under us.

There's no beautiful binding
for this story, only the temporary,

liquid endpapers of the hurried water,
shot with random color. But in the gliding forward's
a scent so quick and startling
it might as well be blowing

off the stars. Now, just before we arrive,
the wind carries a signal and a comfort,
lovely, though not really meant for us;
wood smoke risen from the chilly shore.

I successfully Googled the title of the poem, which I'd read as part of my sophomore year poetry class, first supposing that the author's name was Tony Something, or Mark Something, and then that maybe he wrote another poem about irises.

If you must know, the author is Mark Doty, not Tony Hoagland (he who wrote the most excellent tome Sweet Ruin), the poem's name is "Night Ferry" and the other poem about irises is called "Fog." I have a poster with an excerpt from "Fog" advertising his reading at Bucknell Hall in 1998. I missed that reading because I was too busy being in Pittsburgh and having Court break up with me. And subsequently getting my one and only (so far) speeding ticket.

Note to self: If you ever have a chance to go back in time, listen to the Mark Doty reading instead. Trust yourself on this one.

So I drove to Borders, found My Alexandria, my copy of which is hiding in the SHEEEED! in Johnstown, copied it painstakingly, and cried over the fact that my life is not literary or mind-expanding in the slightest, only routine and humdrum and I don't go to readings, or discuss literature or art or anything at all, really.

And then I forced Dan to proofread another cover letter.