Other days, it is just me in the dusty, dirty shell I call “Mango Dagger,” sprinkled with overnight leaf debris and marred with silver solder dripped from the shower renovation above its winter home in the damp dark basement.
Symbolic kayak is iridescent and a little blurry along the edges where harpoons might once have been strapped. It sails, though implausibly, through storms at sea in my estuary, past the visible tips of nearly obsolete icebergs and past their more significant and sturdy nine-tenths below.
Symbolic kayak expands to the size and depth of terror, the absorbed dread of my parents as small children crossing the Atlantic from poverty-stricken Sicily to the tenements of Lower East Side Manhattan. They were, as a result, brave beyond their years, though deprived and stunted in other ways.
Symbolic kayak has been stalwart through other voyages, none without its specific trepidations. Voyages where the sight of a bird was worth a man’s weight in gold; voyages for gold; and voyages for the sake of beyond. My dusty boat hovering along just above submerged trees and stones and worlds along a marshy shoreline disrupts families of ducks and geese watched by a hawk and blessed by the white egret. What is the symbolism in that?
Some early mornings when no other humans occupy my 360 degree view over pristine water, I declare that “I am Columbus!” It’s not too farfetched as I have been Columbus, and also the frightened children in the inky, wet, surging darkness.
Symbolic kayak sails and steams and flows and sinks over and over while just above the water, my arms propel a slightly less ethereal craft one mile out and one mile back.
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