Oliver Benjamin
“Because a poet changed the meaning. Coleridge wrote about a
captain of a ship who shoots an albatross that’s following them. After
that the winds stop blowing. The ship gets stuck in the middle of the
sea. His crew makes him wear the dead bird around his neck as a
punishment. Now an albatross also means a terrible burden.”
Her eyes lowered. As the weight of this new information moved
inside her he saw a certain innocence sluff away. Underneath he
began to see the resolute, sympathetic face of the woman she might
someday become.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Show me this book,” she said determinedly. They stood up and
searched the shelves for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it
wasn’t there. Where it would have been, Yak found instead a book by
an author he had never heard of before. It was a volume of poetry.
“Rime-bawd,” he said, pronouncing the author’s name
incorrectly. He lowered himself down upon the expensive Persian
carpet and flipped through the pages. Lily curled up beside him. He
read selections to her.
“Wow. I guess people do write about touching each other,” he
said, after some time.
Something took hold of Yak then, a variety of religious experience the
twenty-seven year old had experienced periodically but never
understood, one which he had previously directed outwards on to all
things. He was human, of course and subject to the insistent
underwater currents of his body, but heretofore they had been
indefinitely oriented, diffused, and pantheistic. Once he masturbated
to the sun dancing off the water of his backyard pool, leaving him
temporarily sightless and encircled by stars; once to hummingbirds
drinking nectar from the lips of a dewy flower; once to leaves
shimmering under the caress of an unseen hand. And often just to
sleepy limbic mornings, for their own sake.
But after reading Rimbaud his centerline split and a whirligig
spun along his vertebrae, tugging him towards something focused,
something fierce.
“I have to write now,” he told Lily and went home.
When she finally saw him days later, shaggy and unwashed, he was
grinning and wild-eyed. Ermita almost refused to let him in the door.
“Where have you been, Jack?” she frowned, “An’ why don’ you go
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