Where's that boat going?
by Caleb Horowitz
Lately, I have been trying
to be better at being myself:
read poems every day, write poems every day,
eat better, sleep better—it is not the first time
I have done this, not the first time I have,
beneath unwashed sheets at 2 PM decided,
for a time, things will be different!
At night, I mull over motivations
for my newfound good behavior,
suspect something sinister is behind
my own attempts at self-improvement—
maybe ambition, even greed.
Today, I washed a coffee mug that had grown mold,
poured green moss into the crackling
rumble of garbage compactor,
a small triumph in my cluttered kitchen.
When I was young, attempting
algebra in the Bear Rock Café,
crying holes through my math homework,
my father told me the problem was that
I was lazy. I found it hard then
to care about things
I didn’t care about. I still do.
It is not so hard then for me to believe
that Jonah sleeps below deck,
to the bafflement of the captain,
water leaking through every orifice,
the bed practically afloat.
There are entire weeks
I do not check my mailbox.
I call my brother and tell him
I was not meant to live alone.
This is an excuse.
In the belly of the boat,
Jonah rises, slogs through
the dirty wet.
Still, he lets the fishermen cast lots;
still, he lets them row through the
impossible dark.
But at last I am doing my taxes
and at last Jonah says,
“Throw me over; it is past time.
It is past time for it to be time.”
And they lift him in that trembling
night sky and toss—Jonah
is falling; I am sweeping old dust.
If there is such a thing as Laziness,
big capital L looming,
Jonah, I have felt it! Jonah, look,
there are days that have slipped into
oblivion like a fish through empty
ocean, like a watery nothing.
And maybe G-d does not care
if I write or I vacuum,
but one morning I wake at 6 AM
and, brushing my teeth, I marvel
at the number of times I have
sleepwalked, pathetically crawled
away from G-d, into G-d,
despite everything, everywhere
I walk, find another whale.
Caleb Horowitz is a North Carolinian poet, teacher, and penguin enthusiast. When he is not chaperoning dozens of students across the country for high school speech and debate tournaments, you can find him reading or writing poems about whales. You can find more of Horowitz's writing with Jewish Book Council, Gashmius, Psaltery & Lyre, Tiger Leaping Review, and Calul Journal.
