My friend's and my SOS and a reflection

River Houseboat
(Image by ben.hollis)   Details   DMCA

We will sail the canals and inland waterways

In a house boat with pots and pans

Hanging from the gallery of the cabin

Where we will do a lot of sitting

Watching everything float slowly by -

Villages and forest, flowers and field

Knitting together in the distance

While the canal reflects the pink and gold

Of a sun that never sets.

Someone will be playing a concertina

In a bungalow. A dog is barking.

A large colorful bird is flying across the canal.

My friend's curly hair is salt and pepper.

His hands that have built houses, rooms and porches

All his life will hold a cool drink and a fan.

This poem will not disclose our semi-tropical location.

We will be in recovery for the rest of our lives

Having lived in the United States far too long.

It all started when my sister sent me a video

Of Buster Keaton sitting on a bench

Opening a newspaper that keeps opening

Until it covers his entire body.

He stands up and the bench falls over.

I sent this video to my friend.

The next day we started looking for a rich person

Who would buy us a boat.

We posted an SOS on instagram:

Retired poet and birder / contractor

Looking for free houseboat

To live on for the rest of their lives

Because we are decent people

And have tried to make the world a better place.

Within a week we got a call

From a billionaire who said he climbed Everest

And came down realizing that he needed to do something

Frivolous and decent with his money.

Our wives are in the bow fine-tuning

The wording of their own SOS.
.................

A friend writes: "This poem has a wonderful Huckleberry Finn quality." That feels right. When I was little, especially in the summer, I was a lot like Twain's junior river-rat, footloose adventurer. As I grew up I became a lot less carefree but never lost the taste for "lighting out for the territories". In fact at 22 I conceived the half-baked notion of walking across the country with a friend who was like Tom Sawyer to Huck. That never panned out but I never completely scrapped my (Huck Finn) fallback strategy just in case the experiment of civilization didn't work out. At 38 I did "light out" for the West Coast where I lived in the streets in Santa Cruz for 3 months. 22 years later, at 60, I wrote a musical about a farmer (young man) who has a dream of living on a houseboat with his girlfriend. "We were on a houseboat on a river you and me / trying to float it to the sea / And sometimes it was easy / We were fishing off the bow / and the current was moving nice and slow / Nice and slow, that's how I want my houseboat to go. / When nothin' else is easy, it's comforting to know / That somewhere there's a house boat moving slow."
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