Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

Summer

My family typically spent a month each summer cruising on a thirty-seven foot sloop called the Phoenix. Four children and two adults relating in such a confined space shaped the warrior skills of my adult personality, including a taste for exploration, for reveling in the physical pleasures of water, wind, storm & sun, for the absolute dissociation of reading and thinking, and for reading aloud, also group card games such a Michigan and Oh Hell played during wild evening parties called “Phoenix A-Gogo.”

Trailing

When we sailed I was fore & aft &

Up the mast –

Exulting with the spinnaker –

Bikinied & brown with

Binoculars in hand –

Mapping unseen islands

In the geography of my heart

Scoring constellations

To the cosmology of my brain –

Reading by the light of

Photo-luminescence –

Foraging with seals & jellyfish

Flying higher

Dreaming farther

Fish-hooking memory forever.

Mother warmed the compass

Father was a sextant,

Sisters manned the jibs, but

I owned the reacher-drifter –

Favorite sail

Which makes the most of

Any air