Laying Down a Trail of Wind

Wind pours through the open door and sets my hair into a soft shuffle around my ears, across my nape. I think then of summers of white sails and chopped water and how the rigging singes the air with its whine, how telltales snap and riffle on the stays and the sun bounces blindly off the belly of canvas and into our watching eyes. Our noses are white triangles of zinc oxide and our arms sizzle with iodine-added-baby-oil to make us tan darker, deeper so boys will love us. My hair turns towhead; in photos it’s as if I haven’t any. Braces catch the light and twinkle like rhinestones. Along our route, buoys tip and fro, our tailbones hang above the wash, each wave slaps dark wet patches on our navy shorts. Lines zing through the winches and wrap themselves into snakes on the boards. They are wet, salty – the brine rising in heady air-quaffs. We are pounding-drums sailing close to the wind, battens rattle in their cloth pockets determined to get loose. The wind whips our cheeks in stinging wet slaps. Our arms and faces are rimed with salt. The boom cracks across like a mother’s rebuke. We duck our heads. Shift positions, take up the slack in the sheet and climb back up the windward rail. The other side of our shorts gets wet, the bow of the boat spanks down hard. Puffs blacken the water. We watch them approaching. Will they be lift or header? We point straight out to sea. We have left behind the black cans and all the red nuns marking the trail back home. We are outside the harbor. Waves pick up their pace, rise higher, roll harder, sweep under the boat, lift the bow and fling it down into the trough. Water salts across the bow in a sheet of some fierce freedom we’ve come out here to challenge.

" Only 9% of What We Say Is Understood
Exactly the Way We Mean It"

I am talking
and you are listening
or perhaps you aren’t listening
but you’ve put on a brave face
and I won’t ask you to respond
because most of what I’m saying
is going in and out your ears
like a fast train on a slick track
and the voices of little children passing
break in here, talking to the air,
to the legs of chairs, talking
whether we listen or not;
they are communicating with a world at knee level,
telling themselves through their day
that these things are important,
their treble voices fade as they follow their mother
like newly hatched ducklings, their indistinguishable voices
slipping into my thoughts
like wings of light, what they are saying
less important than the inquisitive sounds they make –
their wisdoms absorbed instead
by the rug, by the covers of books,
the whiffs of air that speed them on their way.
And I am talking, and you are listening,
maybe even hearing, but what version
is mine, what translation will be yours.  

I Talk to My Son

Can you feel the travel of the blood,
the routes the heart takes
on its way to you.  Can you feel
the tropics of my reach,
the pliant arms, hands
that would hold you, that baby remembered.

You, grown tall.
Can you feel the tremulo
to my need to be seen by you.

Though meant to be left behind, we travel
a parallel course, one of us
on the red thick lines, the other
preferring thin blue,

or maybe it’s not preference
but magnetic north that pulls
and pulls each along some path
mapped long ago when we started,
our teamwork meant to come unyoked.

Leave a cairn at the crossroads,
a trail-duck at each fork
along your path, as I once
offered a hand
in case you needed to grab hold.

In the end,
though certain I spoke aloud,
you did not hear.
This is how it’s planned
from the beginning.