Last names here are the order of the day,
chiseled in caps like GOODE. Here and there,
a spritz of color peeks from the dead stems bunched
near a headstone or at the base of a monument.
Even on temperate days, a wind feels close.
Or a shower bursts, and the sky turns ashen gray.
The drops first thump, then pound on a few parked cars
till their engines start and their tires slowly crunch
up the gravel toward the gate at the entranceway.
Or late at night, some boys out for a lark,
drunk with boredom, tip what stones they dare,
the hollow thuds, absorbed by the grass and clay,
leaving behind such broken seals as GO
that cannot feel the wind or rain or air.
Archive
Race
This morning I walked down to the cove, as calm
and hushed as if a ghost had spooked it. On
some nights, alone on the dock, I’ve seen his face
while gazing into the water; then it’s gone.
A natural-born duelist, those “double dares,”
how quickly I outswam him. (One summer day,
years later, implored to clear the woods “down there,”
from what remained of the boathouse came a noise,
his strokes on the rotted ribs of Cape Kidd’s Vamp.)
Swimming to where I thought I’d heard his voice,
I dove, sure when I came up that “Marco’’’d shriek
for “Polo,” reviving his dare. Then one leg cramped,
jerking like a bullfrog gigged or the sideshow freak
we’d seen at a carnival over near Kent one fall.
I’ve never recalled reaching the buoy, just the shouts
of our neighbor’s sons fishing off our dock, the squall
not yet visible out past the barrier rocks
as the splash of something across the cove fanned out
moments before I heard one oarlock
slam the buoy’s leeward, a coarse dark hand
firmly grasping me, pulling me into his boat.
