Tethered sailboats hunched in a row.
A gull sails the diagonal, taut and low.
Wind and sinking sun scribble the bay
With fleeting streaks of blue, green, gray.

No Atlantic lobstermen in my line
(Grim faces leathered from the frozen brine),
Nor any yachtsmen forebears in blue and gold.
I stand uneasy in the twilit cold.

We turn past the point and leave the bay.
The waves foam up and throw the wind their spray,
Soaking the windshields in the ferry’s hold.
I stand alone in the whipping cold.

The harbor was not for me; nor was it theirs.
The whole is no one’s, saved for no one’s heirs.
It’s of no account who I may be.
A life is a wave; it is not the sea.

Oblique angles of a ceiling,
matted thatch of loam and grass.
Roughness marks a patch of healing,
finger pads on hard cool glass.
Arc of lights on car’s back window
drum of drops on hooded head.
Curtain’s folds watched from a pillow,
spine unfolding onto bed.
Eyelids pressed in arm’s bend, snug,
hands squeeze hand, eyes find an eye.
As heels compress a homespun rug,
birds on lines hunch in the sky.
From crib to hospice, these we see;
they are what it is to be.

(West Tisbury, MA)

The boy watches fluid in tubes, lab coats,
Hurried sneakers, hushed exchanges, and thinks
He could grow into one who consults notes,
Gives opinions, adjusts that thing that blinks
Beneath the window that reveals the wall
Of the mall, where later he will sip a shake.
The patient, watching the jagged line fall
That charts his spreading, swelling, burning ache,
Was once the boy and still by habit dreams
Of what he might learn to do and become.
No greater sorrow than to recall your schemes
Of futures past when at last you must succumb.
I am the patient and the boy, hoping I
Will forget these lines when finally I lie.

The first 21 lines of Catullus’ Song 64, in my translation:

Sprouted at the peak of Mt. Pelion,
the pines, they say, pushed right through Neptune’s waves
to the surf at Phasis, Aeëtes’ realm,
when the hand-picked force, those young oaks of Greece,
wanting to snatch from Colchis the Golden Fleece,
risked riding the salty waves on a ship,
and brushed the sky-blue sea with fir-wood oars.
Athena, who protects their citadel,
invented their light flying vehicle,
weaving the pine boards into one curved keel.

This ship was a first for the sea goddess.
When with its prow it plowed her wind-blown swell,
and its oar strokes sprayed white spume on her waves,
a face arose from the froth-covered strait,
a miracle the sea nymphs marveled at.

This one and many others they beheld,
the mortals, staring in the ocean sun:
nymphs rising out, naked, breasts in the foam.

Then Peleus was on fire for the nymph Thetis.
Then Thetis was not above a human match.
Then even father Jupiter knew it:
she was meant to be wife for Peleus.

(The whole long poem is well translated by Thomas Banks. The Latin I used is here.)

Is autumn the one true season of life?
(Or must a long cold winter follow fall?)
October paints with fragile colors rife

the early twilights, and with black, the nights of strife,
when a suffering wind repeats the call:
“Is autumn the one true season of life?”

Sweet roots and crisp apples under the knife
yield scented juices that summer sun recall.
October paints with fragile colors rife.

With thoughts of fledgling days the small
birds huddle tight as husband clings to wife.
Is autumn the one true season of life?

It is the soft wind whistling like a fife
that spins the dancing leaves, holds them in thrall.
October paints with fragile colors rife.

The vein to the past was cut with a knife.
The days drop like leaves, and ripeness is all.
October paints with fragile colors rife.
Is autumn the one true season of life?