My hometown ferry boat is large and orange. Municipal with mousey blue letters telling us the name of our place but the words are occasionally interrupted by the windows on the lower decks. The inside no longer has the wooden benches, we now have the same bright blue plastic smoothness as the buses, and most of the boats have only little side decks for people who don’t want to read the newspaper and prefer to look at the water. We are the ones who hope for the Alice Austen boat. There is a sign at the dock that used to have light bulbs behind the letters, but it was not a very good sign since you could see bulbs more than words. Two slips and one of them lit with “Next Boat”. The world is full of hope since one of them was always lit, even if a few of the bulbs were out, you knew there was a way to get somewhere that you needed to be, soon. The passengers know where to queue and they huddle in quiet piles while the pigeons fly around and wish with the rustle-flap of their grey wings for crumbs. There are hundreds of them. Both people and pigeons, but usually more people. Our side is full of all ramps since there used to be steps, it feels like stilted grammar that is correct but inconvenient and unelegant. A tangle of metal rails filing us as we wait to get across. There are young officers who smile through their boredom and have neatly clipped hair. The boat makes its little yawn across the water in 30 minutes. It takes the people to the city. That’s how we call it since our place is too quiet to be thought of as a proper city and there can really only be one city, so we would never need to say Manhattan. The ferry chugs back and forth, across through the year. Every twenty minutes, every half hour, and every hour when it is very, very late, but it is always going and coming since people have places they want to be. And the ferry will bring us all there to catch up with our hearts someday. It used to cost fifty cents to get home to Staten Island, but now it’s free and they’ve ruined it all with a grand pavilion all cold with glass and white walls. There is an Edna St. Vincent Millay quote in great white letters like some power point program that drank too much coffee and is trying to be whitty. I like Edna’s work, so I find it rather troublesome that her verse is brought to us in such a garish and loud way. Poems should not be words that are three feet tall and in Arial font insisting our attention. They need to be a different sort of touching that eases into your heart the way that someone’s fingers can soothe the tension out of your neck, they ought to knead you with a softness that is solid. They ought to be little whispers like breezes that kiss away your tired sigh into a smile. They ought to be like faith, which has no words, trying to shine out of phrases the way the sun stares through a gray cloud. They must give your hopes bones. They must wash you in rain but not ache. They try to teach why tears are a happy thing when they dip you down to the lowest place and then back up through something that is neither mud nor muscle, only strong in a humble way, because they are not afraid to see and tell you about it. Poems are more intimate than fiction and harder to write since we don’t have the leisure of hiding in a story or a character. But they are attacked as silly as floating scarves and the people who write them must jangle like beads or hide in library drawers. Poets need not apply anywhere, as there are no full time positions. We are not as precise and powerful as the rough sort of men who stench with speeches at you. We are dismissed as the little desserts you might enjoy, but the meat that feeds your blood must come from heavier words than verse. And we should be grateful for our quotes on coffee cups now. Product placement. Except our eyes are cluttered with snips of verse like little commercials and it dilutes our craft like handpainted ornaments in the dollar store. We become just parts of phrases the wind smoothes away on our tombstones. Poems can’t be cut and pasted, they are a whole moment with no seams. They are uncluttered instances that net you in a moment with their own air. If you would let them sit with you that is. Poems should make you shiver because they have struck you the way it is when you hear a piece of music that is played aloud and the notes are more than the sounds of the strings shaking and coming back. The kind that you have to close your eyes to hear and remember in the same instant and your eyes then leak because you can’t quite do either well enough to grasp something so sweet as the way that sounds in that instant. But the City of New York does not consider any of this and is glad for the word “Ferries” to be used in verse. The copper slips with the carvings on the banisters have been replaced by things modern and cold. The old slips are still there to the side but no boat lands at them and the city argues about how much it would take to fix them. But some passengers like me think there a few rare instances that are worth the great deal of time and effort it would make to repair and to build them. There are some who do not mind to always be trying, because they know what is underneath is so strong and lovely and fine and good that even a life’s worth of effort is a happy task, because what they find in each moment is solid so it deserves nothing less than the finest effort. We are the firm believers in nearly lost causes. Democrats who don’t mean to bray loudly, but are Quixotian as we send our letters out to the rough wood arms of the windmills. We believe beyond our reach. We understand this and continue. I look eagerly to the side and the old wood slips when the boat pulls in and would much rather walk out from there with out this smooth metal feeling that the whole world was a great grey escalator bustling you to Bowling Green. Since the first thing you smell then is the subway scent which is warm and thick and not pleasant like wet soot without the burn smell. But I live by the sea and the boardwalk so I don’t hear the horn of the boat at all unless I were there to take it. That is a different part of this island, the old part with the Borough Offices and brick buildings. On quiet nights here when the windows are open I can catch wisps of sea breeze coming in as though it’s teasing me to get up and go for a walk. Until the disco on someone’s radio booms and blares on by and reminds me there is much more to this place I prefer not to see. Plastic picket fences assault my eyes. This boardwalk has been here for a long time. When Staten Island was a place for only vacationers who would have to take a little ferry from 34th street in Brooklyn over to the armory. Before the Bridge and all the other people arrived and the Island tried to be someplace. But it was the water I wanted to tell you about. I have walked there in all the seasons. Some more than others so I can tell you how the sand would feel under your shoe when it is cold and the smell of clay and tide mixed with winter when it is January. It is a very certain smell that reminds me the world is frozen but there are things inside it. I always get mad the life guard chairs- these great white benches about 8 feet high are put away then since I would quite like to sit on one and watch for a few hours. The sand is cold and dirty in the winter and it’s not much good to sit directly upon. It’s like the cold stings up into you. So I turn my collar and walk. And now you can because no one goes there much in January. I guess romantic beach evenings are saved for May or October when the weather is cool the gnats asleep and the world all full of color. But there is nothing more intimate than to take a walk on the coldest grey day and to whisper into someone’s ear that you love them fiercely. Because of course your ear would be cold, and then warm from a kiss and your face would be red from both. But let me tell you the waves since there are tides and they are always there but we can never quite touch them as something whole… Now when it is cold, the water is darker and the sea is actually warmer then the rest of the island since the water somehow warms shore all up even though it would hurt us by being so cold and vast. It’s this gray green color and there are no pieces of ice. The gulls have all almost gone off to better places. The piers are empty and I like to walk out on them and see what is left in the little puddles and how much for the cement is cracked. It all gets worn away you know, like nothing can be stopped from the power of the sea. She is a quiet sea here and no one world think to surf in it, though the boaters are reminded to mind the waters can be quite strong. I rather like that she is always there and turning in some way even when everyone has forgotten. Except of course the ferries or the islands which are always touching her or being touched by her. She is full of tide like a heartbeat and wears even the roughest thick rocks of things we worry about down to sand. She is patient since there are a great many stones people toss and she will wear them all to smooth. She is wild too and you can see it in the way the waves must don these large hats of white foam and are pushed and pushed over until there are dizzy with the tumble. When the tide line goes higher than the dry seaweed lining. I look for the waves and lean my hands on the rail of the boardwalk. The sea has caught my eyes.