“Adrift” by Vivian C. Shipley

or Batwoman. There are cut-outs for her mouth and nose, but none for her eyes, perhaps to prepare her for what cannot be seen. Unlike Cardea, Roman goddess of hinges, who had the power to open what was shut, I cannot lift the malignant mass from the socket of her brain so words might leak out, sentences crawl up her throat. Unable to pour herself into another vessel, if Mary Alice had something to ask me, some knowledge to impart, she has lost it now.

Adrift

A night light for my soul, I no longer have the Bible my mother left open for me on my bedroom table to protect me like a box of latex gloves, an N95 mask. Nothing moors me. Even pushing forward, I recede. Mired in 2021, some mornings, it takes more courage

to get up than I can muster. NYT’s Coronavirus death toll for the U.S. of over 600,000 leads to bathrobe afternoons. My mother would tell me to call on inner resources. I do, but they don’t answer. Poetry, the raft I climbed onto to get through another day of isolation doesn’t

keep me afloat. Learning in science about hugging a porcupine from the front and not the back didn’t teach me to embrace myself. Rowing a dinghy did. The boat was a little tyrant maybe because like a chained dog, it was so often tied to bigger ships. Poems no longer

come sideways, shy and circumspect to surprise me like the dinghy. Small, unpredictable, it was unstable when someone like me, overweight and unsteady, got in. Knowledge of buoyancy, of physics didn’t help and I learned the hard way to lower myself in,

keeping weight in the middle. Maybe, lessons from rowing will help me through these endless days of washing my hands, staying two arm-lengths apart from others. After all, never standing up, I did perfect crouching like a child in school shielding

herself from a Bushmaster AR-15. Rough water? I practiced mindfulness, stayed centered and calm. I’m too goal oriented, dinghy rowing, unlike using a bow and arrow to hit a target’s center, helped me accept my outer and inner imbalances. Meditating,

I kept a steady rhythm, didn’t get depressed as I do each night dwelling on bad choices I’ve made. I gave myself up to the illogical: to row the dinghy forward I had to face the stern. Backwards, I could not see where I was headed and I was able

to point the bow in the right direction by choosing a landmark—if I forgot, I ended up nowhere near where I wanted to be—which sometimes opened up whole new worlds. Rowing in early morning when water mirrored my face, the past faded away. Like the virus

which has a vaccine but breakthroughs of a new variant, Delta, I couldn’t see what waited for me. With a tree or rock as guide, it was another chance to go back to before I began to thumb away hope, be sixteen again, stand on the roadside, my bared hand stuck out.