Jenkins on the Lake

Performed by the Renegade Ensemble on the Schubert Club Courtroom Concert:

This will be the premiere of two more Louis Jenkins poems – “The Lighthouse” and “Sailors,” both
engaging and quirky portraits of life in Duluth. The challenge: how to evoke the deeper essence
behind the words, from the inexorable ebb and flow of the great lake to the irrepressible spirits of
sailors set free on a brief shore leave.

THE LIGHTHOUSE
“Light flashes across the water and is gone, like headlights across the wall of a dark room where
someone is lying awake. It happens so quickly, no way to take back the things that were said. Your
son drove headlong into a train. Your daughter is in a Mexican jail. It’s a house passed at eighty miles
an hour. Did anyone live there? The night, the sea, the wind and the rocks, the terrible current off
shore … It is good to see the light across the water. It is a warning. This is the place where the land
ends and the water begins or the water ands and the land begins. Either way is dangerous.”

SAILORS
“When the ship gets into port the sailors all go nuts. They get drunk and dance and wake up the next
afternoon the the whorehouse. And if a sailor gets thrown in jail he doesn’t care because he just got
paid and has enough money to get out. None of the sailors wants to go back to the ship. One
thing sailors can’t stand is the sight of water. One sailor hides out in a laundromat. One makes plans
to marry. Another is still drunk. The sailors hate this lousy port. The ship sails at dawn with all hands,
but someone has sneaked whiskey aboard. By midnight the crew is drunk and the ship is dead in the
water. The captain is furious and shouts over the intercom to the engine room. But they are all asleep,
rocked in their little cradle on the sea.”