From sELECTED BEQUIA POEMS

from “Exploring the First Map of Bequia”

II

Down come the broadsides, artwork, a stamp

of America, photos of family,

and one of Stan Mikita and me

shot at a summer hockey camp

in Worcester, Mass. With the wrong string,

I hang the framed map up—too high.

Is it a sin to be excited by

a rare and valuable thing?

I drink it in. But what I see

is how it has displaced all else,

just as Bequia, the place itself,

did when, at twenty-five and hungry,

I fell for it, unspoiled, obscure.

And I am back aboard the blue-

hulled Alden ketch Eleuthera II,

a summer hand, not far from Inger,

in the wide amphitheater west

of the Hotel Frangipani’s bar,

gazing gamely in the fierce glare

toward the island, a sailor lost

as if to a lover’s moist eyes

wide in the golden tropic light,

yet to go ashore or write

but found-out, taken by surprise,

aroused. I could have had no clue

I was coming to a second birth

or that, at an end of the earth,

I’d start a life’s work, charting the view.

From the loss of the schooner kestrel

The Launching

Do not be deceived by the calm

high waters you slip spanking into,

nor by these ceremonial attentions.

The history of ships runs hard

with trial, easy with whim.

This coin, placed in your mast step,

is nailed there for luck. No one

can say what, in its give

and take, the tide will do. We know

only the sound of waters rushing

parted past your bows,

that even as it takes you,

you must take the tide. Is that

the wind? Answer and go.

© Richard Dey

from Adventures in the trade wind

He was standing on the deck of a local schooner, destitute after the English ketch he had crossed the Atlantic in had been sold out from under him. He had sailed overnight from Martinique in the schooner and stood on the level deck watching the harbor come into focus in the fresh morning light. He knew he was more or less in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, the crescent-shaped archipelago that stretches six hundred miles between the Virgin Islands and Trinidad, dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea, but he did not know anything more. Why should he? An early morning rain had fallen on Castries. Destitute as he was in the schooner Colombie, he was nevertheless cheered, he recalls, by the “total din” of the peepers and the scent of flowers that seemed to come with the morning light, as the local vessel tacked easily and silently into the harbor. At least in Castries, capital of the British colony of St. Lucia, he could speak English. In his pocket was two hundred dollars U.S., or about one-fifth of his investment in the ketch Enid. The money was in the form of traveler’s checks, already signed in the two places, by whom he forgets.

“This practice was quite common; no one worried about identification in those days,” Morris says. A cat jumps onto his lap as a pause in the music comes with one disc changing to the next.

“On the beach in St. Lucia?” I ask. We are sitting on a veranda, on a succession of January days and nights over several years, shielded from the sea blast by a spray of bougainvillea. Up from Hope Beach, five hundred feet below, comes the muffled roar of the surf, waves driven in from the open sea by the trade wind and breaking on the shelving shore. A green glass fishnet float, found washed-up on Hope Beach and hung from a beam overhead, sways in the trade wind that drove it west over the open sea. We are looking out over several small islands in the Grenadines, one of which, lit up like a cruise ship and populated by the rich and famous, was little more than a fisherman’s camp when Morris, not unlike the glass float, turned up on the beach.

A thin smile crosses his ruddy face, lights up his pale blue eyes. “I was supposed to be sailing around the world!”

Author photo inset by Pat Mitchell