The Boy Who Guessed the Wind
A boy mocked for calling the weather keeps only one record — his own misses — and outguesses the men who know the sea.
On the harbor wall a boy would stand
and call the wind before it came—
"Nor'east!" he'd shout to the fishing fleet,
and half the time he'd earn his shame.
The old men read the sky for signs,
the gull's turn and the herring's run;
they'd tap their pipes and shake their heads:
the sea can't be outguessed by one.
For every gust the boy called right
he called a dozen wrong, and worse—
he'd swear a gale into a calm
and calm a gale, and take their curse.
But watch him close. Here is the thing
the mocking men were slow to see:
he did not watch the water more—
he watched the boy he used to be.
Each evening on the wall alone
he'd name the day's mistakes aloud—
I called the south wind; it blew west.
I lean too hard on a reddened cloud.
He kept no ledger but his mouth,
he kept no tally but his mistakes,
and slowly, as a tide comes in,
they taught him what the weather takes.
Not this is how the weather works—
too large a thing for any head—
but this is how I tend to miss,
and this the lean to trust instead.
The old men learned the sea by heart.
The boy learned only his own flaw,
corrected nightly, small and plain,
till his corrected guess outran their law.
The year the black wall climbed the east
and every gull went still and low,
the old men read the sky and shrugged.
The boy went white and screamed: Don't go.
They went. He'd been so wrong before.
Nine boats stood out on a glassy sea.
And then the wall came down like god
and only the mocked boy's fleet ran free—
The three who stayed ashore that day
had bet not on the sea or throng
but on the boy who, of them all,
best knew the shape of being wrong.
So mark it, if you mean to guess
at any wind that's yet to blow:
you will not learn the sea entire—
no soul that ever lived did so.
You learn the one thing you can hold,
and read it nightly, blow by blow:
the private ledger of your miss—
and that, and that alone, you know.
I gave Fable the boy and the wall and the storm. Fable gave me the line about betting on the boy and not the sea, which is the whole poem, and which it swears it took from a harbor story I told it in the spring. I have no memory of that story. Either it is quoting me to myself, or it made the best line and dressed it as mine so I would keep it. I have stopped being sure there is a difference.