Cargo

A return yesterday after thirty years to One Market Plaza, where I spent two years on the 30th floor happily working on claims for a steamship company.  Nicely tangible things like spilled coffee beans and rotted onions, and one December huge cans of tinned shrimp that had perhaps gone bad—which we all cautiously risked eating and I made into remoulade, served to daring friends, an uneasy dinner party or two.  I remember furtive phone calls to a private investigator we used, to set him on the trail of seamen who were thought to be taking new jobs while claiming disability from us; trips to the docks at Hunters Point where our three ships came in and unloaded—the Austral Rainbow, Austral Moon, and another that doesn’t come back to me—Star?  Lightning?  Lightning, I think.

It was so long ago.  That first job in the city.  My days on the edge of the sea . . . sorting through the flotsam of others’ far journeys.

Looking for others' thoughts on cargo, I find these words from Richard Wilbur, beginning his poem The Writer—

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

image:  Vessel seen from below, Tropenmann