Winterguide 2011

Vessel

What is this body as I fall asleep again?
What I pretended it was when I was small–

A crowded vessel, a starship or submarine
Dark in its dark element, a breathing hull,

Arms at the flanks, the engine heart and brain
Pulsing, feet pointed like a diver’s, the whole

Resolutely diving through the oblivion
Of night with living cargo. O carrier shell

That keeps your trusting passengers from All:
Some twenty thousand times now you have gone

Out into blackness tireless as a seal,
Blind always as a log, but plunging on

Across the reefs of coral that scrape the keel–
O veteran immersed from toe to crown,

Buoy the population of the soul
Toward their destination before they drown.

Written by Robert Pinsky after a night on Cushing Island.

Find more poems by Pinsky at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-pinsky