Sailing- Ian Makowske

This summer we

went sailing in Long

Island Sound and we jibbed

and tacked and came about, but

mostly we sat and listened. And we

watched. And the wind caught and the

sail didn’t luff and we headed out to the

Open. Beam reach and we sliced through

waves like a Lazer, the port side waves cutting

to shore, the starboard breaking west on her side.

She dragged fingers in the water, leaving her mark on

the sea, just as she has left her Mark on me. Four years since

she cut across my path, forever changing my course, her every

word her every wind echoing in my mind and running through my

hair so that she has been a thought in my every turn of the tiller. Those

waves the hull cuts through could have broken in one line across the beach, the

wind now caught in my sail could have blown unimpeded past Montauk out to the

Atlantic. And I could be sailing alone. But I sliced the waves like a Lazer with the turn

of my tiller and I stepped the mast that held the sail that changed the wind’s direction.

And I sang come sail with me. And as the waves that the hull slices and alters begin (as

little ripples on a glassy calm far out and build and compound) we have grown and

diverged as if cut by the hulls of many sail boats and been pushed together by winds,

collided and colliding and converged once more. And as sunburned and salty we return,

having nearly capsized, and the sand scrapes and the daggerboard rises I see our port side

waves breaking around us and look at her and wonder where we shall break. And times I

know I know; I know the exact jetty in Southport where it will happen. And times I will

be sliced, or will slice with my own turn of the tiller and be turned and turn West, West

once more. I can no more read that than the amateur can read the wind or the waves

and so We and I sail on

And roll on