My english teacher, brimming, noted
with reverent chalkstrokes on the blackboard
that the sun sank like a ship
that particular evening
the author sitting under
what must have been a cool blue ocean of sky
or perhaps a cloudy gray one
with the sun, like a 2-ton freight ship,
blindly trekking through its stormy center.


Or maybe the ship of the sun
caught the aching wind in tall white sails
that led its tight brown body,
two cupped hands,
onward by the hand of that bastard captain
eternally drunk and beaming
a sea-salt encrusted smile.

But I, in my 11th grade naivety, thought
that this simile should have been crafted a metapor
as the sun,a humble one-man sailboat
capsized quietly
just past the horizon.