The Sailor's Attempt

an argument in verse

For context:

On "Vers Libre"

So, the placid rower scorns the rest of us,
Who, though we think that meter's great, yet trust
There's worth in wading out into the sea,
Surrendering to singing waves, which, free
From churning motion of your oars, can raise
And draw the swimmer to where Tethys plays,
Inviting him into the ancient dance
Of older rhythms than the crafted trance
Which chains the rower to his manmade seat,
While he his artificial stroke repeats.
Ulysses was a sailor, wasn't he? 
Or so the story goes. It seems to me
He had a lot of ships, a fleet, in fact--
How many of those boats came home intact? 
Did oars, or hulls, or masterful design
Preserve the sailors whom they left behind?
Only Odysseus made it back again
With no ships, no oars, and no rowing men;
He steered a battered raft, lashed from trees
He'd ripped up by the roots, deaf to the pleas
Of the goddess who'd offered him her bed.
He didn't hear a single word she'd said,
But in his hands, he felt the tear of bark
And rub of rope, as, shaping trunks, he marked
And notched and bound and fashioned out a raft
From no schematic, save the inner craft
That kept him working under sun and star
And tore his hands and drove in every scar:
He worked to make a ship to take him home
And fashioned form by inner force alone,
Ignoring, as I've said, Calypso's cries--
What was the poem? Her words? Or the blood dried
Across his knuckles, cracked from fighting wood
To wrestle out a ship with which he could
Return to Ithaca, though little more
Than flotsam carried him back to his shore.
Rower, without your boat, what would you do?
Your ship goes down: have you Ulysses' tools?
Can you make meaning out of ancient oaks
Or cross the ocean, not with fettered strokes,
But feeling every pitch of common speech?
You find yourself unmoored, shore out of reach––
Have you Ulysses' craft, through twists and turns,
To tend, and still for greater knowledge yearn? 
It's neither vessels nor the men at oars
Who sail the darkened sea; it's something more:
The mind that makes the ship and sets the beat
To which the rowers keep in narrow seats,
Which steers a course through beasts with many heads 
(The things that snatch a poem and leave it dead,
Like arrogance, or useless ornaments,
Or holding back the words that should be spent)
And the foaming pool that drags a reader down:
We read a poem for truth; if none be found,
Then certainly the rowers know their job,
But what should live beneath the poem is lost.
Can you lay claim to such a captain mind? 
Have you left scars across your hands as signs
Of struggling, fighting to compose some craft,
That can become a reader's final raft? 
If you can claim this gift, then scorn the traits
By which the free-man sails those treacherous straits.