Welcome to Key West, where we are on our little houseboat soaking up lots of lack of inhibition. Several years ago Key West seceded from the U.S., for a moment, anyway, establishing itself as The Conch Republic, the flag of which flies high still around town. If you’ve been troubled by and since the election, come on down. While the T-Word’s T-shirts and hats sell well, and ironically, at The Little Truman White House here, this fashion statement is one not seen on the locals. Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” remains such, merely an idea. There ain’t much order here. Drop your repressions at Mile Marker One.
Our pier in the city marina, Marlin Pier, is home to a gaggle of joy-filled, caring souls ranging in age from 12 to 90. Vocations and passions include artists, jewelry makers, CSI retirees, fireworks entrepreneurs, horticulturists, teachers of the year in science, blues singers, rock musicians, ice cream shop owners, government workers, sea captains, a Welsh screen writer, eight dogs, day laborers, former Pentagon photographers, knitters, actors, an adventurer who has survived three avalanches, shop owners, charter fishing captains, gourmet chefs on tour boats, and us. It’s the best assisted living set-up in the world: If “Jane isn’t up and out on the pier by ten, we check on her.”
When we arrived on Friday and headed down the pier, we were hugged and kissed and welcomed with the warmth usually offered those who have returned from outer space. Well . . .
“Don’t just do something, sit there!” Come recover for a bit. Just remember that this is a place where on Sabbath morning the parking lot used by the parishioners of the Unity Church is the one owned by the Bare Assets Nightclub.
This week’s poem…
Blue Sky Over Key West
Sometimes when we stand in the loss
of it all, surrounded by what we will never
be, the sky seems to be just fine. It’s blue.
It’s many shades of blue. And it’s there
and will be when we join the landscape
of the invisible. Clouds cross, none ever
the same. And that’s when we realize again
that there actually is no sky, just another
anonymous unknown we are sure we see.
When our dog steps out onto the deck of
our little houseboat bobbing on the nameless
blue-green of this bight and lifts his nose into
the gull-crossed and sea-soaked breeze,
does he see our sky? I like to suppose
he does. Though most likely it’s something
his gentle nose has brought for only him to view.
–Jack Ridl
First published in The Louisville Review
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