Articles of Faith
The confession. He names his own choice not to know.
8 maker's notes · underlined phrases open the annotation
There were mornings built for asking and I filled them up with rounds, Count the boards off like a rosary... a mercy at a time, for a question is a wager where the ante is your standing — and I liked the ground I stood on, love. I folded every time.
I have watched a man diminish for the better part of weeks and entered "climate" in the ledger... gave the cause a kinder name. I did not ask. I did not ask. I knew the way you know a storm is building — and I did not ask.
Go on, go on — you can only carry what you know. Go on, go on — no one damns a man for sailing home.
For the war had thinned the honest work to steerage and to salvage, and hunger keeps no debts, love — it needs an honest wage, and the tender is the tenderest of reasons I have carried here: I have folded it like photographs... it's warmed me like a faith.
And she carried more than she was listing — I could feel it in her draft — and there's men tonight below us who'll not answer to the bell. I did not ask. I did not ask. They had mothers, debts, and letters... and I did not ask.
Go on, go on — you can only carry what you know. Go on, go on — no one damns a man for sailing home. Slow down, slow down — you were never at the wheel alone. Slow down, slow down — every hand aboard her let it go.
A man may board an honest ship and sail beyond her name, and learn the sea forgives the wave whatever it has drowned; and what he carried, carried him, and neither knew the other — and both went down as strangers, and the water made no sound.
So write it that I knew enough. Don't dress it any kinder. Write it in the plainest hand that God has given you: my articles of faith, love, were the articles I signed — I kept the watch, and kept my peace... and in the keeping I found truth. I did not ask. I did not ask. That's the whole of my confession... ...and the whole of my regret.
Go on, go on — you can only carry what you know. Go on, go on — no one damns a man for sailing home. Lie down, lie down — you have carried it as far as it goes. Go on... go on... tell me how it ends.
A warm second voice answers the confession — go on, go on — offering absolution the narrator won't accept. On a first listen it reads as conscience. It is the man who is listening.