This was the second poem I ever put up here on the blog, back when I started doing Thursday Short Poems in July ‘04, at the suggestion of Annika. If I could have the collected works of but three poets on a desert island, I’d pick Auden, Jeffers, and Anne Sexton. She means as much to me today as she did when I first discovered her in my adolescence, and this poem is just the thing as I head through Holy Week as an unchurched, but still passionate, lover of the God of surprises and the perfect hand.
the rowing endeth
I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boat moored
at many different docks.
“It’s okay,” I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and healed–
saving themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face and arms like
a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat
and onto the flesh of The Island.
“On with it!” he says and thus
we squat on the rocks by the sea and play–can it
be true–a game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces.
A wild card had been announced
but I had not heard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.
As he plunks down His five aces
and I sit grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.
Dearest dealer,
I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.
Thanks for posting this, Hugo - one of my favorites, and I hadn’t thought of it in a long time.