The first thing to note: this is a poem.
Not an email to a friend about how you spent an afternoon.
Not a travel brochure describing a mountain lake.
Not an observation of boats moving back and forth.
This is a poem, a complex of words to use as a lens to see an aspect of our complex human lives.
Poems often use metaphor, one word enhancing the meaning of another word. “Party Boats’ is built around two metaphoric images: boat and loom. The boats carry people back and forth on the lake and the shuttle carries thread back and forth across the loom. [shuttle = a device for carrying people and/or things back and forth from place to place as in space shuttle or shuttle bus.]
The poem was inspired as I sat on a dock observing pontoon party boats moving back and forth on a lake. We discover in the last three lines of the first stanza a life that values motion over stillness.
These jolly mariners going to where
they have already never been
with people they have always never known.
These sailors have not spent the time nor paid attention so they might deeply know their place or their people. They weave a life that values skimming over surfaces rather than being still and being deep.
This scene is descriptive not just of individuals but of our cultural. Our fast-paced instant everything cultural favors living on the surface of life, leaving ‘Hardly a wake’ and being ‘Hardly awake.’
Cyndi Lauper sang in her 1983 hit: “Girls just want to have fun.” Not just girls, Cyndi. Our culture just wants to have fun. Currently, people wanting to have fun create super spreaders of the Corona virus. Think of what we could learn if we chose to ponder our collective experience of this pandemic. The poem’s last line: ‘The slow obliteration of joy by fun’ reminds us that fun does not necessarily lead to joy.
Joy requires requires wakeful consciousness. Wakeful consciousness requires the discipline of being still enough long enough to go deep enough.