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Some Afternoon Boats

Every afternoon, I go to the harbor.
And there are some boats, at anchor in my heart.

And its drifted-eucalyptus scent (my heart's),
and the calm flat molten silver it goes between storms.

When I stand on its estuary: the wide sky.
Sunset, and the flightshape of heron.

What do I think will happen, if I err this way?
Follow the blue temptation of the slanting January light

so ravishing, I think to myself each moment 
I can keep it, and I lose it again.

And the white pelican's black-tipped wingfingers.
And the rustle of quail in the willowtangle. 

And the morro a golden moon, 
and the rainclouds rising. 

This is just what life is, 
the need for some afternoon boats.

And the knowing you are missing 
something serious

to give your love to this.

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I’ve been living this past month in Morro Bay. A place I thought maybe I knew, a little—and I did, a very little. I knew I loved the central coast of California, for example. I went to high school not so far south, in Ventura County. I’ve known since at least then that I’d like to live on the central coast. And that such a thing was impossible. I don’t think I quite knew it was my home.

Which is a different story. For now, the story I want to tell is: I can’t get over the sky here. Or the boats. Or the otters everywhere, or the curlews. Or the eucalyptus-scent, or the sound of the Pacific.

Or the morros! They’re just lumpy little hills (the word means something like a hill that’s a little bit smaller than a mountain; ours here are the cores of ancient volcanoes), and they’re fantastic.

Or the oaks: twisty and squat; saturated with strings of lichen and draped with winter sun.

Or the way I skip things like grocery shopping—eh, next week is soon enough—to go walk at the marina one more time today. And the way that is fine. Here’s the thing: I need less than I think. And much more.

I need the quiet, and the living-by-myself—which I have been doing for two months now, in other places too. It’s a right thing. It’s difficult to describe how right. My husband and I—a thousand miles apart—talk on the phone about how this works for us. I keep saying how weird that is, he keeps verbally shrugging: it just is. We don’t have models for this. “Joy is not made to be a crumb,”* so we feast and feast.

What happens next? Some different boats, I guess. It’s a wild feeling: finally answering the invitation to get unattached to the outcome of a given choice. I have this moment, the good-ness of that. I have such love. And poetry to remind me: here; now.

*It’s from a Mary Oliver poem, but I couldn’t tell you which.