Finally some sunshine this morning after days of cloud and rain. I biked down to GANNET and reeved the new main halyard and got a coat of oil on the interior wood. Actually two coats on some areas. I also tried to fix an intractable leak around where the cockpit compass passes through the companionway bulkhead. I could see clearly where water had run down over the newly sanded wood. I have applied sealant to the compass many times before and applied some more. But I am beginning to consider removing it and sealing the hole with a piece of plastic. I seldom use it. I have the Velocitek and both my phone and my Apple watch have accurate compasses. I am giving it warning.
On the rainy days I did housework. In fact I did all the housework and had none left to do after mopping and polishing the hardwood floors.
I also watched some sports on television and a Netflix documentary about climate change titled BREAKING BOUNDARIES. In it I was told that during the Holocene, the current or perhaps just ended geological epoch, the temperature of the planet has been constant, varying by only one degree centigrade. For my American friends that is 1.8ºF. If the Holocene has ended it is because we have ended it, increasing the planet’s temperature more than that since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
I also read a book, PERIL, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, about the end of the Trump presidency and the beginning of Biden’s. I don’t read much about current politics—it is too depressing—but saw in Apple News an interview with Woodward and Costa that interested me. I am not going to make a comment on the book other than that if there is a good guy in it, he is not a politician, but a soldier.
In STAYING ALIVE, the anthology of modern Western poetry a few pages of which I read each afternoon, I am in a section about death and dying. Here are four poems on that subject. Two from the book. Two by me.
I went to the poetry page of the main site and find there only twenty-four poems left.
https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/poems.html
I have been paring away for decades. Of the twenty-four death is mentioned in eight.
Iphidamas
no one who has ever read the Iliad
has remembered you
until me
raised by a loving family
your father a king
you married
but left for the glorious war
before you had lain with your bride
and in your first combat
Agamemnon killed you
that is all
Homer gave you perhaps twenty lines
blew life into you
marched you into battle
had you slain
meat butchered by heroes
the first time I read the Iliad
even I did not notice you
but the second
during my “honeymoon”
absurd word
in Chicago in 1962
with a woman from whom I am long divorced
your brief life made me wonder
what happened to your virgin bride
how soon did she forget
and you
did you have time for regret before you died
or was the thrusting sword too quick
you could not know
that Homer would sing of you
however briefly
and that in 3000 years
I at last would be touched by your death
but if you had known
I wonder
if that would have been enough
1975
3 comments:
You might try Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack Cure on your compass. It’s thin, like water, so it finds its way into leaks just like water, but dries as a sealant. I used it for several minor drips on my boat as well as my home’s garden window. When I flew to Tortola to help a friend sail his new-to-him boat back to New England I brought a small bottle with me and was able to seal a few drips that appeared once we were offshore.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will see if I can find it.
I did. On its easy from Amazon, though I may remove the compass completely and start again from scratch.
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