it’s a bane you’re born with. Out on the deck late at night and two gazers see the cabin light flicker of a faraway ship. One thinks, ‘there’s an uncovered window’ and turns to shipbound thoughts while the other begins to dream and stumble through all the chances and headings on the ocean, about the person that lit the lamp and where they’re due and the past and future tangle of who they might be. Are they like me, asks the watcher, drifting with the same jumbled fears and hopes or set on some great purpose? Do they carry the same longings, the same idleness, and what do they see when they look out at lights from distant ships? And how can I be sure of the truth of any of it, when the ship I’ve seen is still and static on the horizon as a wood block on a blue tabletop but I know it must be bucking and rolling on the waves like my own? That’s a trick of the eyes I know about, where are the tricks out of my reckoning? So, dreams of the other figure hunched over the cabin lamp are just as solid and real as the things you see with your own eyes. That’s how they come to be written down and still ring true.
Every light in a passing ship is a story. And the glimpse of a city bedroom from a train on the elevated track, that face flashing by in the back of a cab, the tunnel of green I step into on my weekend strolls.
