Brigantine, New Jersey
by Mary Turkot
I.
somewhere hidden—
found when flitting
through pages of a novel the graduate student
teaching this 17th century course
hand-picked with all that eagerness
and passion I’ve been missing lately—
it sat in what felt like waiting for me
until it could leap off the page
at the brush of my index
and thumb, soaring into me
with its inky meaning,
splashing off the edge as I flipped,
the salty residue that drop by drop
hits my cheek at the crash of a wave—
this word hit me in that airborne way,
flying off like spray:
brigantine.
II.
a thing, the way nouns are,
the not-person-or-place kind,
I never knew it to be—
but I loved the sight of it
in all of its non-proper glory
when I searched for a definition
to give context to the 1600s sea voyage
of our class discussion,
where the instant result generator
of my intolerable impatience
told me that brigantine means
sailing ship, two-masted
with a square-rigged foremast
and a fore-and-aft-rigged mainmast,
which to me sounded like linguistic twister
but was really something gorgeous
meant to be clipped down to size
and held in a locket
close to the heart.
III.
my Brigantine collects me
each summer to reflect on
(forget) the contents of previous semesters,
but this seems worth remembering:
my oceanography course—
taught by a man familiar with the jersey shore
in that intimate way only possible
through a childhood marked by small
sandy footprints and wooden outdoor showers,
a once-upon-a-time boy
riding his beach-cruiser to the inlet,
fishing and skipping flat shells
on the bay from that dock
with the “no-trespassing” sign—
began with tidal patterns,
wave height vs length and the chance way
they sometimes go rogue
in a storm, taking down ships,
ships like the brigantine,
ships housing crews full of people
in love with the thing that is killing them
but too stubborn and full of wanderlust
to let the risk of the voyage outweigh it’s worth,
ships determined to carry through
every crest, until the very end.
IV.
I’m sure I won’t recall this state’s semidiurnal tides,
or the details of the story that took place
in those pages around the single word
that I have been dwelling on and
turning over like the scuffling sea crab
caught in the pull of the atlantic
before delving back down into tunnel safety,
tumbling over itself, clumsy,
but there it is, the latched locket
above my beating heart
full of patterns not so easily mapped out
in science classes
or told in books
but the ones that sneak glittering moments
of recognition, of home,
into college coursework
and smiling strangers
determined to teach me something,
an unseen pull like gravity
drawing experience together
and leaving me reeling
on the streets and sprawled on the beaches
of my Brigantine, light and sea salt
flickering on my skin,
my hands clutching tight to my chest
the sprigs of meaning
I choose to keep.