Hosing The Decks

Seen from the moss peat warehouse. I had already talked with the guy, to ask if he'd mind me taking his portrait. He didn't, and waited patiently while I fiddled about. His name is Lukasz and the ship is called The Eider. They're heading to The Netherlands after this.

I asked him what his job was and he told me an AB, a Polish acronym which stands for something like 'ordinary sailor.' We talked for a bit. I told him I'd been to Poland very briefly, to Warsaw. I began to describe the enormous Palace of Culture (like a chopped-down Empire State Building), very Stalinist, a lingering Soviet bootprint.

However, he'd never been to Warsaw. Cracow is nice though apparently. I told him two of my favourite poets are Polish (well, what the hell?), Wislawa Szymborska and Milosz. He'd never heard of them. Of course, why should he have? Poetry is the fringe of the fringe of the fringe.

So there I was standing on the quay, a representative from an obscure discipline (stuff practically no one reads), shooting the breeze with someone on the deck of a bulk cargo vessel, just trying to do his job, hosing down the works: a nice little physical abyss to compliment the symbolic one. We had little in common, not even a city we'd both set foot in (apart from Dublin if he'd ventured ashore). But his English was pretty good. Otherwise, most of the above would be blank.