Michael Salcman		WHY SURGEONS SAIL Every sailor has his books and little time to read them—on how to store devilled eggs in the bilge for a trans-Atlantic sail, on how to turn the propane off and cure a shipboard fire, on how to tie a bowline knot three ways fast, secure enough to carry a man aloft the mast or a two hand flip too quick for bar flies putting down their bets. On board ship precision is all, the gauge of your eye on the wind and shore, judging the first smell of rain (as to lightning later), your hand lightly resting on the wheel and compass binnacle, your heart not quite racing in the cockpit of your boat, its clean white walls like a small operating theater.		THE BLACK BOX Dozens of unopened locks sit in a black plastic crate at the gym with little hope of reclamation: no owners, no known combinations. Each month the black box fills up again, is emptied and receives new tokens of how memory wars with distraction, the unopened locks bullet-proof signs of a life, an owner's mind turned away for a moment, perhaps constrained by a honey-do: a quart of milk, of wine, a wolf hound needing its shots at the vet. Other moments were ruminations, plans for a pub crawl in Canton, a secret tryst or some conciliatory gift to assuage the guilt of coming out. Me? I was thinking of Thomas Jefferson watching the Shenandoah River fall through the open vent of its mountains, of how peace might flood a continent or infect a poem. That's when I lost mine.