The Wrong Tormented Sea

This is a poem from my thesis director's new book Gallery of Ghosts. Pretty amazing I think. It seared me when I read it and made me sad. He was the last bastion of hope I had for finding meaning in one's profession. The formatting of this poem is a bit off because my blog does not like ragged beginnings. If you want to read it in its most authentic form, click on the bottom link or buy the book.

The Wrong Tormented Sea
By John Gery

I am as dumb as anyone, of course.
I just can’t accept it. Educate!
they cried back in the 60s, with all the force
of Magellan sailing through his strait,
he who discovered in the Phillipines
one head is worth one coconut.
I’ve never learned to dwell within my means.
Across my ship’s top deck I strut,
assuming immortality will follow
since I’ve surveyed the seas of Homer
and stomached all the Plato I could swallow,
bellying up amid the foam or,
when tossed in rougher waters, Aristotle.
I’ve stayed this course for years on end.
Yet aimless as a message in a bottle,
barely afloat, I can’t pretend
any longer I can see which horizon
my navigators had in mind,
nor that the craft a person lives and dies in
can outperform its paradigm.

http://unopress.uno.edu/Excerpts/galleryexcerpt.cfm