The cliché of hope glimmers on the horizon where my song capsizes; submerged, drowned by metaphor, and the pressure of depth that weighed down its hull till not even a hundred sails, stretched by a miracle head wind could carry it all the way to shore.

But still the need to mark our calendar with more then an x compels me not to go down with the ship and it's song but to endure the doubt, hardship, and whim of the now enraged sea.

What strange things surface now that the ship has been swallowed by the fate it tried to master - the luxuries and vanities unwanted by the deep ... only the unexpected remains. Everything in pieces. Nothing complete. A world broken. Were there but a fog horn at least to blow out a dirge or something? To what base uses we shall return indeed Horatio.

I'm sure the chandelier now lights the ocean floor. So much lost. But still, this need to play the song we were playing before she went down - to pick up a few bars later - persists. But the tune has changed. I no longer recognize the strings ... and the music we were playing is nowhere to be seen.

No. I am only left with the haunting urge to somehow play on but without an instrument to do so - how unfulfilled it is. This feeling of incompleteness. It seemed we were all dancing just a moment before. Couples in dinner attire, crystal glasses and fine linen. Smiles. O, curse the blindness of ease and unseen trouble it hides. Whatever it was that interrupted our happy communion and celebration of nothing, has sunken our revelry and aborted our passage. What was possible before now and will forever be impossible ... yet, still the cliché of hope glimmers on the horizon like a beacon of whatever metaphor you choose to buoy it with.

I am overtaken with this urge to father a little song to comfort those who were on deck while the lifeboats were being lowered into the frigid dark below. To sing another Irish lament for the sea. Yeah, sure, the boat has gone down and with it all it's gold and silver, but we lived to tell of it's sinking, isn't that enough? Is it? To fill your spoken cadenza with more then a few measures of counterpoint forms to weave into some kind of orchestration which might bring a moment of solace to the survivor?

That little Irish folk melody floats indeed. It may have begun in steerage but it did not go down with everything else. It's inside me now navigating my own stars as I rest from the oars for a time. These songs inside me, all of us, reach their true value, their highest value when all the rest is gone or scattered by the tide. It is then, and only then, that their worth is finally known. And their purpose made clear.

It will be my turn to row again soon. It seems like we've been adrfift forever but I know it hasn't been that long. What a strange occasion to find oneself in a tuxedo? I wrestle with my better angels for some kind of conciliation and am left with nothing. All I want to do is throw a line out to the castaway ostrich of this time bomb culture, shipwrecked by this plastic age when the whole world is on fire and the fat lady's standing center stage... but the only refrain I can muster from my parched lips is, "we are alive, my friends, we are alive.”