When You Are A Sailor Without Any Sea Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My wife grew up in a one bedroom apartment in Lanxiou, China
At 3,000 meters,
So she assures me she won’t get a headache if we go to visit my parents
In Nutrioso, Arizona:
But she found out she was pregnant today and grew slightly depressed.
I said, it is a good time to be pregnant, as we took a walk
With our one year old child around the neighborhood,
In the suburbs of Shanghai, China—
I’ve been sick since we got here over a month ago—
I keep worry about our car and house back in Florida:
I cannot enjoy myself—
We are going to the People’s 10th Hospital tomorrow to see if
We can fix my hearing,
So today I just stayed in and looked at houses in Show Low, Arizona,
In the less than $250,000 range:
Meanwhile, I probably looked at my face a hundred times in between
Playing with my first born child.
I ate two cheese burgers for lunch, and that is all.
I need to lose weight. I weigh close to 250 pounds
But I am a healthy day laborer back from where I come from.
I am the only man who can pile four boxes of Idaho potatoes on top
Of each other and carry them all at once to the delivery truck—
This is the job I went back to after being fired from my high
School teaching job—
I am doing just fine
And halfway saved up to buying a second modest home
And semi retirement—Like I said, I am looking at Show Low,
Arizona—
I want to take my wife there next summer—
By that time, if all goes well, we will have our second child—
Now, while everyone is sleeping,
I drink fifty proof Chinese white wine—
It is like visiting the moon while I write this thing:
And on and on, these things I do,
Anonymously for all posterity—
It is the only thing that feels okay to do,
My miniscule progressions through an unseeing,
Unbelieving, and unforgiving world—
I wrote ten note book pages earlier on a sloppy novella I am
Almost finished with
About finding the Holy Grail in China,
Only the Holy Grail is a Mexican woman—my old muse:
It is a laughable mess,
And this is not a poem, but it goes this way
Sometimes
When you are a sailor without any sea.