About Martha Gallagher Michael

“Steinbeck’s Boat, Port Townsend, Washington”

In all the years I have been near lakes and oceans
I have never seen such blue
water
pushing gently against invisible shores,
like a lover pushes the soul to want more,
or as calm can influence a wildness
we cannot see but always are ready to feed on.
And I wonder as I look at the huge docked carcass of his boat,
if a simple remembrance
of riding a current of words that bound us together
could survive better if he had had a smaller boat, one to furl up a sail and catch
another kind of stillness.

It is then I hear a series of sighs
grey and bleak from the molded wood of this giant,
like Gregorian chants in palpable drones
emitted out loud, over and over.
They reach in unison as my organs
twist them like the Loose Strife that take over
the freshness of a Great Lake to make it treacherous,
and remind occasionally of
Ophelia.

Time may know no limit here,
this ship moored forever in ill repair,
unable to move again
in its silky sauce of decay,
and I am part of what he began in writing
and boating,
and momentary salvation is open
to the right page.
Steinbeck made sure of that
in each and every phrase,
as he is there at my shoulder
when I right the words’ direction
or float the bow into
an unsuspecting bay.

Sailboat with Furled Sail, 16″ x 20,” oil on canvas by Martha Gallagher Michael.

Naked John Steinbeck

On the brocade couch, long and lean he looks beyond you
past the fact you are drawing him
and he is being drawn
past the awkwardness of his being naked
past any feelings between you two

Then he opens his mouth with a deep sigh
and a drawl only a westerner could possess
and politely, if not somewhat shyly, asks
“when will you be done?”

This impatience, like a rock thrown through an otherwise smooth clean glass
just polished with fervor,
breaks through to the flow of
in-the-moment mindfulness of seeing and transposing
the thingness of John Steinbeck naked on the couch.

As you listen to Tom Waits singing “Pony”
and the scene suddenly turns red,
then back to white on black
staying incarcerated there
in the moment
you see the dual nature of everything.

Steinbeck is grinning now, having found
his whereabouts to be comical
and your tentative nature
like another unanswered question
he forms:
“Is that what I look like without a stitch on?”

“Naked John Steinbeck,” acrylic and ink on black paper, by Martha Gallagher Michael.