Rum on the Rocks for the Senior Marriage Counselor
Take it from one who’s tacked these straits
and weathered their uncanny gales and waves:
oath-bound pairs won’t abide the direct
course—’speak barefaced heart
to maelstrom tongue. Would you warn
bosun and mate they’re steered
to break on shoals—not hidden reefs
but fatal rocks every fisher knows?
Then scuttle your coasting charts and with good
heart toast them and all who live
at sea, our cold, deep mistress. Say,
finally, we all swim alone.
________________
Manny Blacksher
Review by Marc Janssen
This extended metaphor is of navigating story seas as a marriage counselor. The metaphor starts up to the title “on the rocks” then down the stanza where reefs and rocks signal doom for the boat and its passengers. The chart seems to have been thrown out by the counselor and eventually we have to swim alone, which is either a marriage sunk or people having to make their own way back together.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
We’re quite a way from love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends… (from Shakespeare, Sonnet 116). That direct course, clean cut (echoing a previous poem), that facing of truth – it all seems to be the last thing we want, whether as a couple or as a society. Truth appears to be something that can be sought, mapped, even reckoned only on an individual basis. We (and the “we” is already paradoxical, there is no “we” when it comes to truth) swim alone in our own waters. We do not share waters, just as we don’t share ecosystems; the moment we come together, a whole catalogue of modulations and regulations must be enacted. Preservation. And if you’ll forgive me for correcting the Bard – love does alter, when it alteration finds, and bends…