Sisyphus Takes a Cruise

I promised another Sisyphus poem, and here it is: Sisyphus Takes a Cruise. In fact,  I have an endless supply of Sisyphus poems… just kidding, the supply’s not really endless–it only seems that way.

Have you ever thought how odd it is that we “take” vacations, cruises, flights, even a ride around town? More properly, some conveyance does the taking. The cruise ship takes us on a journey. The plane takes us from one airport to another. The uber driver takes us across town.

If you look at the definition of take at  dictionary.com, you have to go all the way down to the 46th definition to find the usage of take in the sense of using something as a means of transportation. This is number 46 out of 84 usages of take as a verb with an object. Including the uses of take as a verb without an object, as a verb phrase, as a noun, and in a handful of idiomatic expressions, brings the number of definitions given to 127.

It’s no wonder people can find English a difficult language to truly master, even if they can make themselves understood perfectly well. English can be maddeningly imprecise, and take is a great example. Take is a go-to word when you just aren’t sure of, or don’t care to think of,  a more exact phrasing.

However, I am not sure what better word can be used with the experience of vacationing aboard a cruise ship. Floated? Sailed? Vacationed? The problem is made worse by the use of cruise as a noun instead of a verb. You can’t say you cruised on a cruise ship–well you can, but it sounds weird. Got on board in San Francisco and disembarked in Vancouver? Rode the waves? Cruised aboard a ship with hundreds of other passengers?  Set out to sea in a pea green boat? (Thank you, Edward Lear.) There are lots of ways to describe the experience but nothing seems so succinct as take. Efficiency wins, I suppose, as it has been winning for round-about a thousand years since variants of take appeared in languages such as Old Norse, Late Old and Middle English, and Old Dutch.

Anyway, regardless of how the word came down to us, Sisyphus is taking a cruise in this poem. He’s off to Alaska, because, after all, when you’ve been stuck in some hellish punishment, naturally you want to go some place with cooler weather.

Sisyphus Takes a Cruise

Not just any cruise: to a colder place,
that respite might encourage me for another eternity.
Alaska, albeit summer and unseasonably warm,
as if I’d brought my own hell with me.
Expectations unmet, yet exceeded. Turned inside out.
Hands grasping at glamour, gilded railings, mirrored
elevator doors. Stewards’ eyes flicker
while they fake friendliness on this foreign ship.
Scent of strawberry champagne. Napkins folded
into perfect swans, art auctions, teeth whitening sessions.
Almond oil massage. Tanzanite jewelry in every port.
Continually refueled by a tender of hopes unfulfilled
while the tiny hot tubs of studio-lot happiness
remained filled to capacity. With waiting lines.
Bordering now on the edge of nowhere, a glacier
falling into a bay, a fjord. A deep water port that won’t ice.
All this joy they must—after all, look at them— be experiencing,
yet in my pocket, the black hole I carry, my stone.

If you enjoyed Sisyphus Takes a Cruise

You can read more of my work on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Sisyphus Takes a Cruise was first published in Woven Tale Press, Vol 5, #3, April 2017.

Missed a poem of the week? A list of links to previous week’s posts appears on this page.

I hope you have a good week this week. We had snow overnight, again, and my daffodil shoots are starting to look a little ragged.

Look for another poem next Monday. In the meantime, if you think of a better verb to use than take in the phrase ‘take a cruise’ let me know!