Lucas Jacob

Landlocked

She says she wants to go
sailing.  It is a fine
day for it, the breeze bending
the thin-limbed ashes and stirring
in the larger oaks a liveliness like
thousands of fingers at play
on the instrument of pleasure.
 
That there is no body
of water sufficient to sustain
even the smallest craft
would not signify if to sail
meant to move over sun-cracked macadam
as if indifferent to need, as if borne not
on thin-soled rubber shoes but on the air
 
she might rather use to travel
than to breathe.  But she means
to sail.  If the trees were growing wild
deep in a wood in which she had found
herself on a whim, or had been planted
by her hand or that of a forebear,
this wish to be on water
might not beset her so.
 
Often it is that way: the wish
grows where it will not
long survive—how you loved
a girl when she was still a girl
and could not love but as a girl,
how a woman who tells you
she wants to go sailing is not
 
that girl grown, and perhaps
is not any other, but simply is,
and you must allow her that but do not
know how, never having learned
not to see all of the man-made
boundaries, the blocks of roads
of neighborhoods of cities, the ways
we rein in everything wild
of ourselves and tell the others
that we alone are how to be.



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Lucas Jacob’s work has appeared in a few dozen journals, including Southwest Review, Barrow Street, and Evansville Review, and is forthcoming in various others. A native of Chicago, he now lives, writes, and teaches in Fort Worth, Texas, where he is humbled on a daily basis by his students’ writings.