Navigare necesse est vivere non necesse - Pompey

The perfect sunlight is an accident.
You might see him any day at noon.
An old lobsterman, a new Ford.
He needs little of his eyes to follow
as you walk beside, and then behind.
His face like a brown, stained bag
from decades in the open air he leans to still,
his chin almost at rest upon the steering wheel,
his purpled ears precisely sealed against
some ailment by cotton, gauze and tape.

It is mid-day; it is summer,
and pleasure craft traverse the harbor.
A dozen guillemots bob like blossoms
underneath the ceaseless cackle of gulls.

What dances in that pure light gathered
in his lenses as his dark hands pull upon the wheel:
the diamond chop, the islands, a life
as singular as granite broken free?

His denim shirt is buttoned at the collar.
And though the wind blows hard offshore,
in his mind, perhaps, he feels its shift —
a sudden whip of spray, a subtle loss
of balance in the swells beyond Matinicus.

One finger slides to tap the dash,
and his mouth moves like a turtle’s,
chanting something to himself, to himself alone.