Hilton Head Island: manana was yesterday; death poems

I returned to work mode yesterday morning and labored on GANNET for three hours, scraping paint, taping bulkheads, and cleaning up the mess I made.

I returned this morning and painted for three hours.  GANNET's interior is now painted from the main bulkhead to the aft end of the pipe berths.  And so am I.  Some of the painting was directly overhead and gravity was not my friend.  I checked myself in a mirror before leaving GANNET and applied turpentine liberally.  It burns, but I already knew that and quickly rinsed with the hose.  However upon returning to the condo I saw a blob I had missed and later felt another farther back on my bald pate that I cannot see.  They will wash and wear off in time.

Work will not resume until Monday when I will move everything from the forepeak  and scrape paint there.  Paint Tuesday.  And then a more complete cleanup, including sanding all the interior wood I can reach.  I have always been a messy painter and have become messier with age.

I read ten pages of JAPANESE DEATH POEMS each day.  Unfortunately I have only five more days to go.  I have enjoyed them and given enough time will reread them again, but not immediately.

Some were prepared in advance, but many were written the day the writer died.  Here is another I like.

The thought came to me last evening that I wrote a death poem many years ago.  I looked for it on the poetry page of the main site, but it is not there.  So somewhere along the way I rejected it.

I remembered the first line:

wind and waves of torment cease

Then it occurred to me that I had ended STORM PASSGE with it, but I was wrong.  When I checked STORM PASSAGE I found that the last words are:

Egregious man, boat, voyage, life.

The fool smiles and sails on.

Not bad if I say so myself and maybe even a death poem.

Some of you may know that I named EGREGIOUS after the root meaning of the word, which comes from the Latin and means away from the herd, which I certainly was on that voyage and have been all my life.  In the past being away from the herd was thought worthy and the word meant something remarkably good.  With the rise of equalitarianism, and even more now when the herd dictates through social media, being away from the herd is considered to be shockingly bad.

Finally I remembered what follows wind and waves.

The couplet is:

wind and waves of torment cease

to become a poem of this senseless voyage.

I expect I wrote that during the painfully slow sail back to San Diego from the Southern Ocean with broken rigging and an unsteady mast after my second failed attempt to reach Cape Horn.  Consider a play on 'senseless'.  Expecting oblivion, death will be without senses as well as meaning.