Islands
April 17 2014


Marooned,
a desperate man, a speck of land, an endless sea.
The wretched thirst, the blasted sun.
Raw fish, trailing guts
that reek of salt and blood.

He hallucinates
out of oppressive sameness
time's terrible weight.
Imagined voices, enchanted sights,
ghosts of ships
in tricks of light.

Like a parched and wasted castaway,
whose rudderless boat
bumped-up against the shore,
the solitary man is ship-wrecked
trapped inside his head.
His recurring thoughts
go round and round
feverishly eating their tails.
He circumnavigates
his small principality
over and over again;
like that zoo-raised bear
in its shabby cage
pacing the concrete floor.

Islands, containing islands.
A single man
on a spit of land
enclosed by trackless sea.
On a minor planet
in the vast ocean of space,
circling, circling
inescapably.

The oddly comforting constancy
of a small familiar place,
where his is self-proclaimed god
master of all he surveys.
Or king of darkness, fallen angel,
rattling the bars
of his own creation
he alone can hear.


I know this poem sounds very autobiograhical, in the sense that I'm introverted in temperament, solitary in habit, and susceptible to an unbecoming misanthropy: in other words, a kind of castaway on a desert island of my own making. But I'm not tormented by any of that; perhaps disappointed in myself, but certainly not the castaway of this poem. And it's certainly not the sort of thing I'd set out to write about, either as validation or confession or cry for help.

Actually, what started me writing this was a single sentence in a recent New Yorker article: Geoff Dyer's Shipmates ....life on an aircraft carrier (April 21 2014). He writes:

The ramp hatch at the back of the plane lowered slowly to reveal that we had landed in another world—albeit a world with the same pure-blue sky as the one we had left. Rotating radars, an American flag, the bridge, and assorted flight-ops rooms rose in a stack on the starboard side of the deck: an island on the island of the carrier.

I loved that idea of islands within islands. And also the cozy feeling of self-sufficiency you get on a boat out of sight of land: where everything you need is contained, and all the stuff of daily life is miniaturized and clever and stows as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle. I get a bit of that feeling on a canoe trip, in which you're a virtual island cut off from civilization: as self-contained as a turtle, carrying its house on its back (especially under that canoe, slogging along the portage!) ...Although very little of this got into the actual poem. Except, perhaps, in the last stanza: in the "comforting constancy/ of a small familiar place" and "master of all he surveys".

That it took such a serious turn -- with its physical suffering; not to mention intimations of John Dunne, spaceship earth, virtual prisons, delusions of grandeur, and self-made hells (the devil is an angel who fell) -- I cannot explain. I suppose the facile answer is that my subconscious was speaking. But not necessarily, since once you have the castaway in mind, the desperation and dire straits inevitably follow: as much Tom Hanks as yours truly.

I really disliked the first draft of this poem. It was only my usual frugality that compelled me to try to rescue it. So the poem may not be great; but considering I was that close to throwing it out, I'm very pleased that several version later it ended up as good as it is -- at least reasonably OK.