A ship sails across the sky

A poem about fear and grace and a twenty-something poet

Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash

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I often get surprised, Tuesday afternoon, by which poem raises its hand to be featured in Wednesday’s Substack post. This is one I absolutely had not planned for, but here (as they say) we are. Written decades ago, revised just this minute. Not the style I usually wrote in, in those days; miles from the style I usually write in now. And its own thing even so.

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EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE AND THE NIGHT SKY              1983


No stars tonight.
Black wind-scrubbed sky, the moon
full tomorrow, thick now with light.

In my pocket my fingers pace
through brown beads tangled in neglect,
brown beads knotted round a cross of neglect,
a brown wooden cross.

(Bless me, Father, for I have)
(tomorrow)

A ship sails across the sky,
cloud-galleon close-hauled to a stiff breeze,
its course set for the moon — 
buoy, or rock for its wrecking?

In my pocket my fingers fret and shake
the knots they paced into being.

(Bless me, Father, it has been)
(too long)
(since my last)
(tomorrow)

When they collide, which one will crack,
the cloud-ship or the moon?

The cross has worked to the center
of the beaded knot.

(For these and all the sins of my)
(tomorrow)

The ship takes on the moon as treasure,
as sacks of jewels and gold, as signal torches,
as kegs of brandy for the crew.

I slip the beads from my pocket,
rinse the tangles in moony cloudlight.
The knots dissolve, flow through my fingers
like gold and jewels.

(Absolve you from)

Now the ship sails away, treasure-laden
(Father)

the cross rests in my hand on a hill of beads
(Son)

and the moon will be full tomorrow.
(Holy Spirit. Go in peace.)

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I’m a lifelong Christian who has moved around the neighborhood some. Raised in mainline Protestant churches, I became a Roman Catholic while at university and stayed one for twenty years or so, until I couldn’t stay any longer.¹ Many things I learned in that church fed my faith and helped me live into it better; other things stressed me out — notably the Sacrament of Confession, which I understood and valued in theory and found harrowing in anticipation (and sometimes in practice). I still remember the night this poem was born — me standing on my stoop, in late winter near the start of Lent, watching the night sky and fretting about what I needed to do before Mass the next day, tying prayer-beads into knots in my pocket. The relief of the unknotting, just as the cloud lit up with all the moonlight it had onboarded, felt like an act of grace. I’m grateful that I thought to write something down.

1. Not crucial to the story, but if you wondered: my “falling away” from Catholicism was more of a side-step into the Episcopalian church. Sacramental liturgy and coffee hour? Women as priests, and LGBTQ folks too? An open Table? I am all the way home.