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P. Scott Cunningham Miami (LD)
Qasida of the Pinecone after Lorca The pinecone wasn’t asking for the dawn: almost undead on its limb, it asked to be alone. The pinecone wasn’t asking for science or shadow: the mind’s and body’s limits, it asked to be alone. The pinecone wasn’t asking for the pinecone: the stillness of the sky was in it; it asked to be alone. Originally published in Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018) Campbell McGrath Miami (P. Scott Cunningham) The Red Dragonfly: After Shiki In Memory of David Dubrow, 1992-2013 1. The red dragonfly knows the way to the gravesite-- one-year unveiling. One-year unveiling, out past the airport--Tile Works, Oasis Dream Spa. Sound of the airplanes taking wing does not disturb the red dragonfly. Yellow butterfly, late summer in Miami, no sign of autumn. No sign of autumn, the greens and blues of summer too bright for our eyes. Too bright for our eyes, the red dragonfly’s shadow falls on David’s stone. 2. The red dragonfly watching, darting, hovering, thinking of David. Thinking of David-- honor the dead by living-- thinking of Shiki. The mockingbird sings all day without noticing tears falling on stone. Tears falling on stone as butterflies flutter from flower to flower. Flower to flower, hour to hour and day by day, thinking of David. The red dragonfly, the yellow butterfly, the stone bearing David’s name. 3. Little lizard, hide from the mockingbirds with us, summer’s survivors. Yellow butterfly, honor the dead by living like grass in sunshine. Like grass in sunshine-- even by grief, mockingbird, the soul is nourished. Summer sun at noon, and still autumn comes too soon, even here, too soon. Too bright for our eyes, the greens and blues of summer, tears falling on stone. O red dragonfly, hover here, above his grave, after we have gone. from New and Selected Poems and also published in South Florida Poetry Journal Sarah Carey Gainesville (Jen Karetnick) A Pileated Woodpecker Shares Where to Find God I live for what the dead give. Hidden by leaf screens and branches, I pillage rotting wood. My tribe fought long for salvation, after the forests’ razing, dug into ragged stumps, felled trunks-- a miracle of wholeness from fragments, a feast of insects who thrive on decay. What’s left when I leave is for others to say. Should you see my black wings and red head knocking wood for nourishment, you might ask if I believe God is dead, as Altizer said, that God lived and died in Christ, that the church lied about becoming the body—but what Altizer said was not what most thought he meant, he really meant in death, life—a spirit indwelling to drill the dying down, incarnate carnage, God’s passion. If you ask me, I’m proof he was right. If you listen to my rat-a-tat melody echoing my drumming beak, you may hear an answered prayer of oneness in desire’s shrill tattoo, and the thrumming of your own wild heart. Originally published in SWWIM Everyday, 2019 M.B. McLatchey New Smyrna Beach (Sarah Carey) Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal Do not take. She makes you talk no matter where you sit. I greeted you at the door, another mother’s child delivered. You looked away as if a lamb had been slain. Your early sounds parsed, seeds seeking ground – then whole thoughts crowned. Ridiculous grader. She actually reads your work instead of the deserved A. So hard to put a score on this – this wrestling with your age. Rubrics hold out such promise – then fold, fade. Instead of systems: a new thought, like a starling transporting a golden bough, was what we praised. I didn’t come here to read ancient epics, poems, plays. Remind me again how this gets an engineer employed? Leaving Troy, Odysseus had one thing – Ithaca – in mind. The gods gave him their scales: slay the proud boy in you and die a king regaled. A cyclops, sirens, a bard spared among suitors to sing your tale. All of them pleading: Set sail. Set sail. Originally published in Sky Island Journal, Issue #23, Winter 2023. Peter Meinke Saint Petersburg (M.B. McLatchey) The Last Holiday …all day under the sun with hoe and hose taking advantage of the holiday to whip his garden into shape which he is out of so when it’s time to watch the fireworks he begs off Poor old dad closing his door that evening losing it missing the show But behind his shut lids shimmer crinkled streamers of boston fern sparklers of campanula and carnation daisy pinwheels and ginger flares: A pyrotechnical dandelion parachutes on the black wind! Ans high above them all spraying like a burst heart a perfect Rosa Multiflora its petals dissolving in the patriotic dark like pink aspirin… Sidney Wade Gainesville (Sarah Carey) Beatrice Rising When I lived in Florida, I grew large. It all grows large, in Florida-- the elephant ears, the cannas, mangoes large as melons, and the melons like Mars. My heart ached in Florida, large and round and stubborn, like the moon hanging heavy and red in the laurel oaks. My head grew large, my eyes so large I could see from coast to coast, the brilliant, lonely sands, the abrasive, shining waters. And all those tiny houses, hardly asleep in the night, filled with tender nightmare and uncontrollable desire. And then my arms, yes my arms grew large and began to rise without effort, through the heavy green night, little rivulets of moisture slipping down my sides, and my body too slipped slowly from its tether, rose inch by inch till my thighs, my knees, my calves and ankles trickled free of the moss, of its spidery hold. And yet something seemed to be holding me back-- as I spun slow in the night sky I saw with my wonderful eyes that my heart was tangled, ever so gently, in the feathery ribs of the darkly draped trees. Kate Sweeney Largo (Sidney Wade) My Daughter Talks to Water My daughter talks to water, sings to the bubbles in the bathtub, waves her tiny starfish hand to the intercoastal as we drive away from the beach. Asks it, Can you hear me say ‘goodbye’? My daughter talks to fish and they come, pinfish and sharks, circling the pier as she stands at the edge. I grip her wrist like a shackle and she struggles against it like someone committed to something against their will. She was conceived in Amsterdam, where canals slide beneath cyclists and flowers potted on bridges. The next morning her father and I stood over the Bloemgracht and watched a crane on a barge pull twisted spokes and lawn chairs from the brown water. My daughter talks to the moon, a scrap of wet paper hanging over the bay. She tells me it is pink because that is the only color she knows and I start to believe it because she says it with more certainty than anyone else, about anything else in the whole world. My daughter talks to water and my son tries to correct her, tells her Water can’t talk. But she and I know the difference between the things that chatter and the things that speak, the difference between the yank of an undertow and the gritty sooth of your own tide. Carolina Hospital Palm Coast (LD) Magnified Miracles -I know of nothing else but miracles. -Walt Whitman I do not understand their making, but there they are when I walk beneath a dome of royal poinciana blooms to peek at the sky bike ride through a dense mangrove forest that bursts into bay wade the shallows at low tide, as sea foam cushions my bare feet follow a squirrel scurrying from post to post across a high wire spot a ruby-throated hummingbird shimmer against the firebush await the full moon to carve a wake of light over the dark swells feel the weightlessness of a child asleep on my shoulder sway to Santana with the one I love Every breath is a miracle Every atom Watch them kiss Lauren Tivey St. Augustine (Carolina Hospital) Drift Velocity It was in the afternoons before parents arrived home from work, that free time between bus drops and streetlamps and homework, when we rode Big Wheels with banana-seat bicycles, multicolored plastic streamers quivering from our tufted handlebars, playing cards fastened to spokes with clothespins, a rhythmic thwock-thwock-thwock echoing up and down neighborhood streets, our yells and yawps bouncing off the faces of split-level homes. Us savages of suburbia, on the move, liberated, loosed upon the modest cul-de-sacs of conformity, the sprinklered lawns of the planet, from backyard sheds to fetid ponds to broken-glass fields to infinity, through archipelagos of stars, delinquent constellations, us space cadets with our skinned knees, hair of twigs, and Kool-Aid moustaches, we roamed, we roamed, in the orphan twilight, flung by the winds, by devious escapades, for the amusement of gods. And then the call for supper, our mothers’ voices reedy in the dusky air, macaroni and cheese steaming in avocado kitchens, cartoons squawking from television consoles, and this is how we lived our strewn-about days, partially ungoverned in the anarchy of afternoons, and we pretended obedience, but our heads were full of interstellar madness, and our hearts were full of wild grace. from her manuscript Gen X Primer Liz Robbins St. Augustine (Lauren Tivey) Wild Sweet Orange Now in middle age, my haymaking comes in tiny pouches, often tea, wild sweet orange. Why do we unequivocally worship youth? My friends and I say, you couldn’t pay me to go back, as though our teen years (our dewy skin, our sinewy lines) were a steamy hostel in a foreign country, a frat party where we were rarely sober. Hallelujah, here we are, having clearly—if barely—escaped. Now the desk lamp flickers like a downtown club’s strobe at midnight, and the purpose we’ve always known clarifies: our offspring will be fine, if we tell them our stories. If we wait for the tea to brew. We give them what we carry, bagged and packed, and in their hands, it turns to tartness and light. Jeff Santosuosso Pensacola (LD) Railyard Just West of Kansas City The railyard throws out its chest, stretches its shoulders. The Earth below bursts with track, swells with wheels, fat with freight, forms a delta, an enormous steel cattle drive. I see the cars of the nation, cars beside cars beside cars beside cars. Beneath me, Kansas City. Parked freight awaits arrival and delivery, promises kept by the carload, futures secured with linkages and couplings, engines and smoke, lurches and whistles, choked by tonnage that yields to the raw power of coal, like the Earth’s exhalations blowing boulders across a continent. I am certain of stock pilers, lifting and heaving, sweating in winter, breath bellowing work into daylight of this great congestion, this standing-room-only stadium of goods, of hardware, livestock, grains, coal and parcels, this economy bursting like cotton bolls blinding whiteness across the Delta. Laura Sobbott Ross Mount Dora (Jeff Santosuosso) Amaryllis We readied the bulbs in the days before the baby arrived. Full solstice moon nudging what was curled inside its own winter sleep; every bulb, nested & rooting. Miraculous, the way green startled out, ribboned toward the light-- light that was a new dominion lording across a tracery of capillaries, eyelashes, flutter of breath, the fusing of the soft crown of bone. I’m talking about the baby, of course, whose wails shuddered open from her newly dredged lungs, while amaryllis pushed and pushed its flame points skyward till they fell over on their new, floppy necks into the full-throated red of bell-shaped blossoms. Jim Steele Howie-in-the Hills Laura Sobbott Ross Sweet Silence The mountain we see from a distance changes when we gaze up from its base. There is beauty that is meant to be enjoyed from a distance—it’s why we can’t stand within our own horizon. She sat on the right side of same park bench everyday, on her lunch break. She rarely ate though, choosing to read instead, mostly the classics—F. Scott, Jane, and Ernest. For a couple months, I always sat on the other end of the same bench, also reading, while stealing glances in muted fascination. I never spoke to her. Our tilted-head-hello’s was our only conversation. Then one day she arrived and I was sitting on the opposite end of the bench— her end. She paused for a moment and I looked up. She dipped her head hello and seated herself on the left side. On the third day of our new locations, she turned to me from her end of the bench and spoke up, “I’ve been wondering why you switched ends. You always sat here and then suddenly over there.” She half-smiled, in brightened curiosity. After a few moments, I replied: “It may sound silly but I noticed that if I sit here, your shadow falls across me and I think it’s romantic.” Her eyes widened, her mouth opened slightly— “Oh, I love that.” I smiled sadly and stood, “I did too.” I nodded my head goodbye and walked away, I never returned to our bench. I never saw her again. No friendship could measure up to what I had imagined in that sweet, full silence. The romantic in me had no desire to travel toward her, knowing the wonder I’d imagined would only change. She was part of my horizon. Nothing more. Sharlyn Page Mount Dora (Jim Steele) The Ripening When early from the infinite, I chose the twig that touched the sky Hearkened to a sound first heard from topmost leaf, sussurrant word, It was the sky-tolled call of home, and recognition rustled down the bone. Then my body in a seeding race became Earth's transient spawning place, Life called out, hoarse from earth, the rounded body insisted birth, As suckling newborns, wet and red, force surrender to this self-made bed. Here below are voiceless gardens, seedlings faint for thirst, I rise to bring the water, stoop to raise the earth. Granted a god inchoate to hold, mute till touch is voice, I learn the need to feed at root, oblique to choice. Michael Trammell Tallahassee LD Song of the Grasses In the grass of the old riverbed I claim the dance of one million species, balancing on my hands as a way to greet the noon bells from the church where all one billion species live, reinventing themselves as songs in the grasses. Here is where I make my rhythms, within ghosts of rivers, balancing on one leg because the one trillion species enter the left heel as the song in the foot of the bells, a constant kicking, a way to break the river clear of the grasses, the insistent whisper of the one being. Mary Jane Ryals Tallahassee (Michael Trammell) Florence after Lockdown, 2021 --for Greg, Jonathan and Michael On the bones of my ears I hear chatter all day and all night, the chatter of Saturday city-- the bust-out from lockdown for months the echo off Santa Croce piazza of dog bark of horse clip-clop, of dishes clattering, church bells clanging, the double-door slam of palacio entrada. In the alleys song of North Africans calling to god, that release of pain. Our neighbors who live here say during Covid Firenze was so quiet that the foxes and porcupines walked the abandoned city streets. On Sunday in the Duomo, the pipe organ blasts bass, vibrates through us like lions, the priest’s voice a rasping tenor, tender surprise. The solo by the alto reminds my ears of water and wavy glass in a beach house at sunrise. Where are you? Where is your sound when you are thinking? For me, the purple flowers in pots at Le Vespe Ristorante sing the soprano of the choir woman-- slow vibrato rising as incense up and up. These old choir songs take me to Appalachian Americana songs 700 years later, only with guitars and banjos, their major and minor weaving like Penelope’s silk gowns. This wistful prayer, yes that same release of pain. |
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Peter Hargitai Gulfport (Howared Camner)
Opening at Town Shores From a drone The man-made waterways Spread out their fingers A sailboat sputters Past humdrum condominiums Toward the mouth Of Boca Ciega Bay The old Mercury puffs A few thick clouds Before it stalls Then a lull The timing near perfect: The wind billows the sails Full sail ahead The ageless current That drives the air That stirs the water And moves the hull Toward the sea moves me And causes my fingers To move across the page The drone zooms in to showcase the pool As it juts into a widening channel The area deserted Except for an old man near the water’s edge He is regally robed and safari helmeted Sitting and writing In the cage of his red-wheeled walker It is summer in Florida He interrupts himself to look around Then goes back to taking notes On the secret life of plants Zoom in closer: I am that man I open myself to the silence There’s enough of it here To hear the tiniest of wings Not the drone taking Wing from MacDill Air Base But the sound of a frail creature Swollen with pollen Toiling to hold itself up In the empty air Waiting with grace For the fall The inevitable splash In that same instant Sun sparklers trawl their nets Across the surface To catch this quiet How could I have missed it? Something sacred was about to land Swimmers invade the pool Instead of swimming they stand In the water or move a limb Talk of tai chi and yoga And cancer and catheters A father with Alzheimer’s A neighbor’s lingering terminal illness A death For a few seconds all is quiet Maybe too quiet The air begins to cloy With baby oil and iodine A professor whose gray hair is braided Announces that the spirit Must be grounded in light Another interrupts her With The Power of Now Soon all is aflutter The sounds distant and nonsensical As the chirping of birds What they leave behind Is stillness so maddening The shrill lawnmower Is welcome noise Stillness then Is not the absence of sound And loveliness not always a flower Unless I see it for the first time How the filaments in the center Thinner than paper Aspire upward Opening Never preening And when its time has come A petal does not mind drying Never minds Falling Under the nose Of a mechanical owl And barrier fishing lines Two Florida sparrows land To gulp water Splash one another And spur the moment to frolic One flies away The other looks on The slight wings beating the water To drown its sorrow Before it too flies off In the same direction Stillness is not Always the lack of motion The birds were not nervous When they gave themselves Over to doing what they do They have flown beyond artificial nets Even ceremonial doves Defy formation without Fretting about falling Or bettering their last Audition On the Tiki hut A palm frond loses its footing The vertical drop Fans into a swan dive Still it misses the water And scrapes along the pool’s edge Waiting to be airborne again In the shadow Of a sundial A caterpillar plant comes to life Breakdancing to a sudden gust The stem shivers and little hairs Thin and fall Into transparence In the whitening sun Each floats on air To its own rhythm Its own Stylized breaking crawl The mower cuts all that have landed In its path into finer filigree To be airlifted or sprayed Into green water And carried out colorless As they reach the sea They are as much a part of the great Current as the dancing seahorse The feather star Or the rainbow anemone What was dander in the grass Is now a great spirit More brilliant in its sheerness Than the oleander The pool light comes on underwater I watch the lightshow on the bottom Lace curtains dance in and out of focus And shudder at the slightest touch A single breath from me sets off ripples Changing the mesh of an entire universe Each pattern more intricate than the last As sound waves translate Into shape-shifting Fractals of light I keep blowing on the surface Mesmerized by zebras crawling Down my leg The shifting lines continue to drill Their spiraling illusions Right through the concrete To the underside of life All I do is to poke A finger in the water and—voila! A diaphanous mandala Alive and billowing Spreads out and downward And starts to gel In the viscous slow motion Of a lava lamp overflowing To an underground river And an endless formless Waxen ocean The submarine light Insinuates itself through The murky green of night vision Into the very treacle of the sea And what unfolds before the eye Is an undulating breathing Undiscovered yet familiar —opening— Forming and reforming In fleeting time-lapse Corals becoming reefs becoming An island of coral The runway of the landing As I tread way Into the secret life of the jungle Leaves waver Dry and yellow Into haystacks of old Europe Changing in shape and color Into towers of Cholla cactuses Teepee huts crowned with The feathers of raised spirits Images of burial mounds Subterranean pyramids Glowing embers red and volcanic Burst and spatter Every edifice cornice and porous Surface of concrete jungle With a riotous magma of color Melting and molding Every molecule Into sacred geometry Gecko gargoyles mechanical owls A razor-sharp sunburst Appear in glaring colors To scare off buzzards unwanted Solicitors and all other bloodsuckers That impersonate time From the Kenmore to Embassy row Condominiums raise Their sacred totems To the beat of Tocobaga drums An ancient wind instrument Billows the sails And makes the fingers of water tremble Artists bricklayers dragon slayers Sailors and whistling minstrels Woman warriors Weary from battles for their Own secret heart Every grain of sand Blown here from distant shores Every brush and crush of petal Filament of flower sundial and owl An animate and timeless Sacrament of grace Originally published in Opening at Town Shores (YellowJacket Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Peter Hargitai. Used with permission of the author. Jonathan Rose Miami Beach (Peter Hargitai) Six poems Lettered Puritan New England' Hester Prynne In her day, wore an "A" for unspeakable sin. Now with sex extramarital, kinky, and group, The fashion would be to wear alphabet soup. first published in. South Florida Poetry Review Indecisive Hamlet, the Dane, Was a royal pain. It would not have meant a jot to me Had he determined "not to be.” for published in Poetic Justice Vested Thomas Howard, alias Jesse James, Was a businessman, despite contrary claims; Bullish on banks for most financial gains, He was the first to speculate with trains. first published in Rhyme Time Unforeseen William Sidney Porter Was a clever retorter; Through his briefest tale you'd go twisting and bending To be stunned with a wonderful O. Henry ending. Originally published in Writer’s Info Lost Amelia Earhart, renowned flier, Prided herself as a "do-or-dier;" We know her position when she last flew, But that was one time she did not "do." Originally published in Rhyme Time Deceptive Poet-theologian John Donne Ostensibly would accede to no fun, But, I have it on reliable account, Themes for his sermons came while on the mount. Originally published in South Florida Poetry Review David Axelrod Vero Beach (LD) A Great Spirit (Winnipesaukee translates to “smile of the great spirit.”) The chill of September lake water challenges me. It always takes extra will power to set my feet down blindly feeling soft mud squeeze between my toes, lowering myself as cold water reaches my bathing suit. The diving raft, twenty yards out, was a long swim for me at ten. Even now, accustomed to ocean’s buoyancy, I sink quickly, but without the little kid’s moment of urgency wishing for an adult hand to pull me up. As a little kid, I’d make a silly self-dare that I could make the swim unaided and not be some sickly kid. From what I learned from asthma, struggling for air wasn’t a heroic thing. Granted, my mother used to tell me “Someday, you will be better.” Of course, she meant medically weller, but the opposite of “better” meant I must be bad. Here I was, returning at middle age and I still heard echoes taunting me that it would serve me right if I drowned. How long before I’d be found in the dark water? I heard a fellow had filled his pockets with rocks and when they finally found him, fished him out, he was blue and bloated. Maybe it was all the dark water he swallowed. I was the kind of kid who worried about what was in the lake water. We joked, “Fish piss in it.” Now, I know diatoms, not pollution, tint the water dark. But the thought of a vastly-deep spot still conjures wisps of my disappearing. Kids know the boogeyman is real. He’s the real reason people vanish. To be daredevils, adults learn to take risks, but most kids take unknowing chances. Panicked by a need to live, as a kid I couldn’t, as I do now, breaststroke upward, roll on my back for a deep breath, stretch out and stroke toward the weathered raft lightly rocking as I stroke toward it to climb the wood ladder. Bright sun bakes the initial chill away. I savor a few minutes lying back, eyes closed. I stand to dive in again, checking to be sure it’s deep enough to leap headfirst without fear of a broken neck. Poor Billy in my grade school who was paralyzed for not checking. Even then I thought, “Who could live like that? Nothing you could do? I would rather die.” And he did die a dozen years later, never again shouting, as we kids did, “Mommy, watch me.” My mother would tell me that when I reported whatever prejudice or cruelty, “There’s nothing we can do.” Once, when a neighbor kid split my scalp open with a rock, my parents couldn’t even get his parents to pay for stitches. Early on, I knew things could be worse than death. If death took you, maybe it ended your pain. Swimming off the raft, no one is close enough to save me or even notice if I let myself go under to drown. I’ve checked in to the cabin alone, said nothing to a soul except the cabin’s owner whom I see is way down shore tending to business. My parents would bring me here for a week-long vacation in the foothills of the White Mountains. By late summer, evenings were already putting a chill into the lake. They would rent a musty cabin, maybe from this same fellow’s dad. We’d have a sitting room with a kitchen counter, two bedrooms with army blankets over stiff sheets on hard mattresses suspended on mesh chains. Not even enough sand along the steep lake shore for a kid to fill a pail, scraping with a blue plastic shovel. Back home, we lived by the ocean where there was plenty of sand. Why come here except my folks would say, “Let’s get away.” We’d pack the Oldsmobile for a long ride, with me asking, “Are we there yet?” culminating with sandwiches for supper, early bedtime. For me, nothing to do for those vacation days was still better than starting school. Ma could ignore cooking except to slap together peanut butter and jelly, or boil hotdogs. My Dad could take a break from wrecker calls and engine breakdowns, his skills focused on a one-lung Evinrude for fishing in the center of the lake where we caught an occasional pickerel. Never anything as grand as a bass. A family vacation—better than kids I pitied whose parents sent them off to sleep-over camp. At the lake, I’d wheeze from ragweed, but I could venture out alone, wade through primrose though I did need to be cautious not to let it catch my ankles. Avoid the bulrush, snap off a cattail that could mimic a whip or serve as my mock cigar as I wondered why life was hard. Seventy years later, I’m still trying to solve what some joke is “the mystery of life.” Maybe it was actually hiding all this time with the great spirit deep in the dark waters. I decide to dive and touch the bottom. I twist upward, break the surface, scissor kick. Far less gasping and drama than when I was barely able to make it on my own. Again, I climb up, tuck my toes over the edge, do an acceptable arc into cold water. I frog kick back to the ladder to climb up again, letting eddies run down my sides, trickle on my inner thighs like a kid who has peed his bathing suit. “A fish will bite you there,” we’d laugh skinny dipping in a secluded spot near my home. And now, just me nearly eighty in an old bathing suit. But why wear anything at all? Okay, the law, or mischievous fish who’d yank at me. Better wear this suit to cover what parts are left of me though I’m equally used up, blanched by too many immersions. Still, I’m able to cinch myself up on an exquisite day. I remember when a friend and I, building our own scrap- wood raft, were nailing boards. I hit my finger and the pain was exquisite. I’d heard that term “exquisite,” for first time at a matinee. A cowboy said it. “Are you okay?” my friend asked over my hollering after I hit my finger. And I had to say it, though he had no idea what I meant: “The pain is exquisite,” but it sure took a long time before the aching stopped. Later, a big, blood blister. But the nail grew back. I’ve come back to Winnipesaukee looking for signs the way fortune tellers in ancient times read augurs. An eagle rises from pitch pines, slowly circles the shore eying a rabbit. It’s not a water fowl, doesn’t dive or alight on water. I’m neither osprey nor eagle—more likely to duck than attack. I’m losing height and weight, figuring when and where to alight. Hundreds of years of people have swum here. How many drownings, miscalculations, “I can swim from here to there.” Or sudden seizures, lost below the surface. There were, certainly, people who stroked far enough out to assure their own death. Then, there were also the winter cracks on thin ice with too-late hands pulling up hypothermic, blue faces. An afternoon-soft breeze has quickened to an imminent thunderstorm. I’ve known those so true to their faith or so heavily armed by habits that they don’t heed danger, or simply can’t shift plans or change direction. I dive toward the shore where I drape a rough towel over my shoulders-- same as the cabins always had only it covered more of me when I was ten. I make it inside the cabin just as large drops let loose with a lightning flash. I count—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. A boom. I calculate the lightning is a half mile away. This old cabin, with its wide boards nailed to true timber— full 2 x 4s—will protect me though it’s uninsulated. I’ve rented it for one night. Time enough if I swim out and simply sink. Instead, I pull off my bathing suit, rinse off in lukewarm water. I treat myself to a second, clean towel, pull up my worn chinos. Once, I was a sickly kid who actually made it all the way out alone, but hoping someone would notice me. If my Ma were there as I perched to dive, I’d be crying, “Watch me.” Now, I see the brown water thrashing the shore. Whitecaps rise as the louder, more-rapid thunder approaches. I could rush out heedless, sink or swim. I sit by a partly- opened window to let a wet wind blow in. The fierceness of the storm passes me by. I’m okay-- for a fact, I’m serviceable, and still very much alive. |
