Fisherman's Ditty

Roger Mitchell

Goodbye to the little yard full of clover and crabgrass,
the sagging carport and the neighbors. Farewell to the rabbi
who ate nothing but pizza, to splitting wood in the driveway
on a portable stump, which the neighbors watched
from the shadows in back of their kitchens as I brought
the maul down on a life that was hardly a life at all
but a series of internal negotiations over which of  us
put out the most orderly, incumbent trash of the week.
It was a life I asked for and loved and never knew why
it never seemed to be mine but a wave that washed over me,
my head full of voluptuous seaweed, shipwreck and foam.
Believe me, I love to lie here singing this fisherman's ditty,
a bit of rope in my hands for practicing my knots,
mind loosened by grog, whine of the squeezebox, wheeze
of the salts cantering out onto the deck under the stars.
Beneath the tune, unmistakable and huge, the sea's heave.