Ode on a Buoy
I'm sitting on the deck of the Fantasy on day three of a five-day Carnival Cruise.
We've just left Key West and in the harbor is a pale green buoy
bobbing by in waves as blue as waves in the painting of some old master
half-remembered, hardly visited, and hung in some unheralded corner of the Louvre.
Six or seven times, right over my head, the enormous ship's enormous horn just blew
and like white mice, or water mites, all the little schooners, skiffs, and dinghies,
sailboats, party barges, yachts and jetskis recreating in the harbor
fled the path of the Fantasy, turning, slothlike, west and south into the open water
of the Gulf, Keys peeling away behind the pale green buoy
until it is the only thing I see besides the sea—pea green, not pale—bobbing dutifully,
nodding hypnotically, knowing nothing, nobly, robotically, tall in small sun, knocked
backward, chop-slapped, wake-clapped, green-glad, rustily butlering
the eye through the sum of the sun, knowing nothing, and I'm seeing it all
through the Fantasy's white-painted, iron-wire railing, which keeps me
aboard as it cuts the ocean up like a musical measure on watery paper,
and now the bobbing buoy, moving through the measure as the Fantasy passes it by
is like the rise, the fall, the rising fall and falling rise of a melody I can't hear, yet can
love, the imagination of which is the same as the experience of.
