Carrying the Boat
It is not spring.
Yet the apricot blossoms are in bloom.
The river is not visible.
There is a boat for the river that cannot be seen.
The men carry the boat up the slope.
The weight of the wood digging into their shoulders.
Sweat.
The fibers of the rope.
Cracked paint.
That should have been enough.
But wood is not just wood.
Cedar dried in a Phoenician port.
A hull descending the Yangtze River.
A Viking keel.
A dugout canoe from Lake Biwa.
Every boat holds the memories of others.
Each time a piece of timber crosses the sea,
the world carves into the grain a time different from the tree rings.
The men were silent.
Silence is not stillness.
The weight being carried occupies their words.
In ancient China,
the character for boat was a vessel for crossing valleys.
I have heard that.
I do not know if it is true.
But characters are trustworthy.
Characters have preserved human misconceptions for thousands of years.
Carrying a boat.
It is a strange act.
Something that should float on water,
is being carried on land.
It is like taking a fish into the sky.
Yet humans have continued to do this for thousands of years.
Where the canal ends.
Mountain passes.
Rapids.
Borders.
In this world,
there are places a boat cannot cross on its own.
That is why shoulders were invented.
The men stop halfway up the slope.
A shadow falls from the bottom of the boat.
The shadow is also in the shape of a boat.
The shadow is also being carried.
I am watching that shadow.
Then suddenly,
Achilles' black ship appears.
Homer's sea breeze.
The scent of bronze.
A fleet pulled up onto the beach.
They, too, carried their ships.
No civilization
has ever been established solely on water.
In the end, someone always uses their shoulders.
The Roman roads.
The Silk Road.
The Tone River.
The Nile.
History is the poetry of circulation.
The names of heroes remain.
But the bones of the shoulders that carried the loads do not.
The boat is carried even higher.
The rope creaks.
The wood groans.
That sound resembles the sea.
Or perhaps,
the sea resembles the wood.
For the sea is also an ancient boat.
Clouds drift.
The boat drifts too.
Though today, it drifts across the sky.
The men reach the top of the slope.
On the other side is the river.
It is not yet visible.
But the boat knows.
The boat always sniffs out the water before humans do.
And then I realize.
It is not just the boat that is being carried.
The men, too,
are being carried by an invisible current.
From ancestor to child.
From port to port.
From stone tools to iron.
From song to song.
From shoulder to shoulder.
The boat is heavy.
But what is truly heavy
is the thousands of years of passage loaded within it.
At the summit, the men set the boat down.
No one applauds.
History
does not record moments like this.
Only the wind passes through.
The wind is light.
The boat is heavy.
But after a long time,
the wind carries more things.
The men grip the ropes again.
The river is near.
The invisible water surface
is reflecting light from the other side of the world.
The boat heads toward that light,
as if it were the memory of returning itself.