On Martha Silano's 'Is This My Last Ferry Trip?'

May 9, 2025

Scrolling my feeds early yesterday morning while unable to sleep, someone had posted a link to a Martha Silano poem, "Is This My Last Ferry Trip?" (Poetry Magazine, May 2025). It begins with an extension of the titular question:

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys
in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us
to our parking spots before we head up

two flights to the passenger deck

A few lines later, the narrator commemorates "this maybe / last trip to San Juan Island" with an indulgence of creamy, buttery clam chowder. She refers to these things with familiarity: she's seen these sights and heard these sounds, eaten this chowder.

The word last haunts these proceedings. It rings through every observation and sense-image long after the poet has stopped using the word itself. Why is this the narrator's last ferry trip? What is happening that makes this trip an endpoint, something final, a passage to nevermore? By the end of the poem, it's clear (though there was never much doubt). This is about an impending death, the death of the narrator.

The poet behind the poem, Martha Silano, passed away a few days ago after having been diagnosed with ALS in 2023. "RIP" said the social media post that shared this poem, and it took me a minute to piece it all together.

If the content of the word last leads us to an end of something, to the final remnants of something, it is also an echo of something earlier. I am at the end of my semester and so recently celebrated the last week of classes, the final week of classes, in a series of many weeks of classes. Several of my students were graduating: this semester, they took their last courses of several years' worth.

⊕ The significance of the ferry trip in the mythology of death and dying here could get a post in itself, but for now I'll just note it as a really interesting layer to the piece.

To ask, Is this my last ferry trip? means there were trips before. The last vision of "the guys in their neon-yellow slickers" means they were seen before now; "maybe / last trip to San Juan Island" means there were trips that preceded this one. But the last doesn't just mark the end in a sequence; it also does work in its projection backward, it shifts the meaning of that which came before, somehow.

It also suggests another question of all of those befores: what were they?

The guys in the neon-yellow slickers: how much were they noticed before now?

The earlier trip or trips to San Juan Island -- what was it/they like? Perfunctory or special, or something in between?

In Poetry, this poem is coupled with another from Silano, "Self-Elegies," playing with similar themes. There, though, the poet pays more attention to the obliviousness we adopt toward our mortality and our corporeality throughout much of our lives.

My nineteen-year-old self didn’t
imagine this. I was learning bird calls, hermit thrush 
and song sparrow. Keeping a list, but also wandering
the forest counting the decades forward, a human
life like alpine snow that seems it will never melt.

Late last year, my wife and I decided late last fall to add some chickens to our family. We've never had chickens - they'll be our first - and a few days ago we learned that they are ready to be picked up.

One first often means many firsts, big and small. Our first chicken coop will be built from scratch, the largest structure we've built ourselves. We have been working it steadily but the weather has not been cooperative, and so it is a little more than a frame with a roof right now; it is wall-less, floor-less, not yet wrapped with the hardware cloth that will keep the dangerous critters out and the young pullets in.

So this evening we made a trip to the tractor supply store for some essentials that will help us set them up in the garage for a few days, while we rush to finish their permanent home. First purchases of starter food, bedding, vitamins, food and water dishes.

We grabbed some ice cream on the way home and drove to a park to eat. Sat in the car because it was getting buggy out. This is common for us, enjoying an early evening treat with some people- and critter-watching at the park.

I looked over at the playset nearby. "When's the last time you went down a slide?" I asked.

Both of our memories were murky. A long time, we decided, and we started to try to pinpoint possibilities in our pasts. But we soon followed other conversational paths, got pulled away from that particular errand, and before we knew it, we were talking about the present again.

About the things that need to be done. About things we might do in the future.