Talk about a Christmas gift. My sister in law sent me something from the family archives back in Connecticut. How she found it I don’t know. It’s a poem I must have written around my third year of college and sent home. I have no idea who kept it. It’s about my father. He and my mother were divorced when I was very young and he went to sea becoming, of all things, an officer in the passenger ship industry and then the freight industry. I had forgotten this. It’s over fifty years old.

December Harbor

The mist comes in on December Harbor, turns the salt water to stone.
Seagulls ride the whitecaps like horses, held by the wind, motionless, frozen, white.
The bitter air cuts through coat and flesh, embracing liver and lungs in splintered needle hands. Feet kicking, toe numbing, hands-in-pockets-blue, nose running, eyes blurring, wind.
Watching December Harbor Ship come in.

The December Harbor Sailors disembark, move down the gangplank, huddled, tans squinching and squinting, turning to December Harbor Dust. Their pea jackets seem made of nylon. They don’t sing but curse, loudly, in many colors
Eyes turn to the palm trees of Manhattan, grey, forbidding, so ominous they seem to scratch the sky. Dirty water glaciers seen from the docks of December Harbor
The sailors shoulder bags of breadfruit and silently head for home, walking.

The solitary sailor stands at the edge of December Harbor Deck. He ponders, he listens, he whispers to the honk of tugboats, to the slow, methodical, rust of cold water on metal.
“Stephen, the cargo once was people – yeah, vacationers from Iowa, conventioneers from Georgia, schoolteachers from Boston.
Drinking Barbados rum, laughing, kissing, greeting family and friends, sharing it with you. You, excited by something done a hundred times, yeah, a hundred times before.”

Longshoremen move sullenly through the cold, hooks hanging like icicles from their belts. Lobster Dinners from Durban, dead ammunition from the Mae Cong Delta. As frozen-and cheerless as the buildings on the land.

“Stephen, is it any wonder I’m so tired? The sea is dead, my dreams didn’t last, the life I loved is past, and look – my sons are men, and I hardly knew them as boys.”
The solitary sailor stands in the mist. Black hair streaked with grey, the streets of Rio etched in his face, tan furrowed, creased with a map of the world. His tongue is burned and overflowing with the hot, flashing tastes of Leningrad, Jamaica, and Tokyo. His eyes are blue, deep, confused like the December Harbors of the world.

The December Sailor fades away.
To telephone calls and letters postdated months ago.
My eyes – burning – my throat – aching – follow him.
The seagulls scream to their mounts, a long, thanking and forgiving call, and fly away into the mists of December Harbor