Where a Poem Has a Smell

Along the upper estuary, boats laid beached on mud like whales you see on news clips stranded helpless in the drained shallows of a low tide. These boats too were out of their natural world of water and easy float, their freedom was the distance swung on the arc of a rope. We would clamber up their listing hulls and into the ribbed bellies of the bigger boats, huddle in the dank, fish foul air of cabins and turn wheels hard to port. They were the holds loaded with the cargoes of our childhood. Later, there was a sad absence occupying the helm, neglect peeling the paint and seeding rot into weathered timber. They stunk of decay. Most boats were abandoned, fastened for years to the monotony of tides, sentenced for life to lift and fall on the same spot or sink and be broken up. And yet they remain anchor points to what is real, positioned as it were in a world where things can be felt, have substance and assume a shape mirrored in your mind. They float secure on a sea of nothingness whose sterile depths beckon and beguile and would claim poetry to feed the ethereal swans of Stephane Mallarme. Here is where a poem has a smell as well as make you feel and think without recourse to meaning, becoming mere magic.