Scrounging local garage sales... near ten years past... I had found a flat, welded iron, rusty seahorse... 3 feet high... with a good seahorse shape and poise... edges welded and cut... after the haggle... twenty-five dollars..... perfectly added to my estate... covered rust in gold sheen... mounted upon a tree... to greet all comers... with a seahorse kiss!    
     Seller said it was made by the same artist... of the turtle lady statue... to be found in Corpus Christi!  Asked if I had seen it... my reply... No, but I liked the seahorse piece! He expounded... the artist... only had one leg... but was a surfer... well known for this trait... in Corpus Christi!  
     After I had mounted the seahorse... upon it's tree...I did an internet search... looking for anything about the one-legged surfer artist of Corpus Christi!  Found... nothing!  
     End of May, 2019... visiting my sister, Donna... we were wandering Corpus Christi!  She guided us to the surf museum... not knowing the story... of the one-legged surfer artist... creator of my mounted seahorse!  
     Girl at the front desk... Kyla... real nice and friendly... told her about the seahorse and questioned her... she didn’t know... she never heard of a surfer with one leg or the turtle lady statue!  Looking at us just a bit strangely... one legged surfer???
      Donna and I... started our stroll through the small museum!  Along the right side... stood a long row of surfboards... I’ve never surfed... but I was imagining trying it with just one leg!  
      Anyhow... I didn’t really stop to read or look in any detail at any of the exhibits until I reached the back... there was a glass case... which had a piece of simple letter paper...  8.5x11... taped to the front of the glass cabinet!  I started in reading the last paragraph...

     “Welch, 53, and his wife, Chelsea Louise, 23, died September 15, 2001, when their car plunged off the edge of South Padre Island’s Queen Isabella Causeway, which partially collapsed after a string of barges crashed into the bridge’s support pilings!

     Thought to myself... Wow... Who is this guy???  I jumped up to the middle paragraph...

     “Welch lost one of his lower legs in an auto accident in the 1970s, but he kept surfing with a prosthesis.  He wore a peg-like prosthesis at first, then got one with a foot.  He won the prosthesis division of the United States Surfing Championships on South Padre Island in 1998.”

     In the glass case was a welded metal sculpture of a beach scene... with waves, palm trees, and all!  The piece did have some resemblance in style to my seahorse sculpture!  Also, there was a picture on top of the case... of Harpoon Barry... striking a muscular, no shirt pose... in his tattoo shop... his torso covered in tattoos!  
    
     “It is said... he was on the verge of suicide after losing his leg. In one interview with the San Antonio Express News in 1992 he said;  "I may not make it to heaven, but you can be sure I made no deals with the devil to get where I'm at now, "  Looking down at his false leg stretched out in front of him, Welch said quietly: "It is a real empty feeling when you put one of these on for the first time, especially if you are an adult on your own. And your mama'a not there and your daddy's not there, and the people in the hospital tell you, 'This is the best it's going to get.  I made my first leg myself, out of Hi-C cans. I couldn't wait for my leg to get finished. I wanted to walk. I guess I got the idea from the Tin Woodsman in 'The Wizard of Oz.' That leg actually worked pretty well!”

     I had found my one-legged surfer artist!  I walked towards Donna... who was already half-way leaving the museum...  I hollered to her... she just had to come see this ... “I think I found the one-legged surfer!”  She had recently had partial knee replacement... and was hobbling!  She said if I was fooling her... she better not walk back all that way for nothing!! She came back to the glass case... we read through the letter in it’s entirety!  
     Then we went... and told Kyla at the front desk... she again looked at us again a bit strange... but then reluctantly left her post to go with us to take a look... she was then astounded!  Said she never knew about the one-legged surfer... although she had worked at the museum for several years!  Said there were also a couple metal sculptures... at the front of the museum... she thought were also done... by Harpoon Barry!  We took pictures of those also!  

In the letter we also read...

     “Welch had numerous tattoos and body piercings.  He wore a tiny 14 carrot gold harpoon through one ******.  That is how he got his nick name according to a friend, Scott Gangel.”  

     "I am a unique, self-made sensation!” he said matter-of-factly... in the interview with the Express News!  
    
     It's been 18 years since eight people died when South Padre Island's Queen Isabella Memorial Causeway collapsed... sending 11 people into the water below... four days after the 9/11 attacks!  A string of tow barges had struck the supporting pilings!  A section of the roadway had collapsed...
     I promised Kyla... I would donate my seahorse piece to the museum upon my death!  I only hope my death... is as grand as Harpoon Barry’s plunge into the Gulf of Mexico with his young wife!  Wonder what they were doing during the plunge... what was Barry doing... yelling Yippee Ki Yay... or Surf’s up... Dude!!!... maybe???  
    
Surfed waves on one leg
Young wife... crazy life... grand death
Harpooned by Barry

©  2019 Jim Davis

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
     has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
     it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
     poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
     valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
     out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
     and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
     for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
     the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
     parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
     sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
     and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
     grappling plans of business and questions of women
     in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
     earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
     hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
     mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
     architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
     and the press of time running into centuries, play
     on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
     in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
     without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
     and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
     at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
     layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
     man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
     end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
     gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
     and each name standing for a face written across
     with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
     ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
     ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
     tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
     corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
     and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
     ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
     the building just the same as the master-men who
     rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
     empties its men and women who go away and eat
     and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
     all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
     them.
One by one the floors are emptied... The uniformed
     elevator men are gone. Pails clang... Scrubbers
     work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
     and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
     and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
     miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
     money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
     holds... Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
     and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
     pockets... Steel safes stand in corners. Money
     is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
     of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
     red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
     of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
     crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
     and has a soul.

[On my birthday]
                
                
At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

When ever I touch the ground that’s hot
With the sole of my foot that’s bare,
I never fail to recall a time,
And the memories lingering there,
Of a day when I was just a boy,
Beneath equatorial skies,
And the tactic used to keep me indoors
While the missionaries rested their eyes.

My mother was sick with malaria
The curse of the tropic zone,
And while my dad was away on the hunt
Their station became our home.
And after lunch when the sky was hot
And the morning’s work was done
They took my shoes away from me
To keep me out of the sun.

The veranda air was still as a grave,
Not a sound to could be heard outside
Save the click-click-click from the beetles
And the grasshoppers jumping to hide.
Or the scratching scaly slither,
Of a snake on the flowerbed verge,
Or the distant cry of the crested crane,
These are the sounds that merge.

The sight of the distant Koru hills
Shimmering in the haze
Beyond the frangipani trees
Return once more to my gaze,
And the prickly spiky Crown of Thorns
That lined the garden ways,
These are the sights that ribbon back
From my early Kenyan days.

The smell of the room was a mixture
Of scents on the garden air,
And creosote coming up through the floor
From the pilings under there,
And paraffin from the pressure lamps
Which hissed as they gave us light.
With the hint of oil of pyrethrum
Sprayed round the eves at night.

The step to my door should I venture
At noon was as hot as a stove,
The soil on the paths and driveway
Would burn if ever I strove.
And the thorns in the earth would pr ick me
As I cautiously picked my way through
To the shade of the frangipani tree,
From there I took in the view.

So, when ever I touch the ground that’s hot
With the sole of my foot that’s bare,
I never fail to recall a time,
And the memory lingering there,
Of a day when I was just a boy,
Where the images I find,
Set smells and sights and sounds of
Africa sizzling in my mind.

Redding, California July 4th 2005 temperature 105° Fahrenheit

all resolution is slippery,
the firmer the foundation,
with pilings sent deep,
the swifter the undermining.

there is an inertia
in drawing breath that becomes
an immovable focus intent
on repetition alone, always
leading to itself; call it
the myth of life, for this
temporal existence stands
far from our true being.

so says the sage, planting crops
so says the priest, spinning comfort
so says the banker, theatre tickets in hand
so says the poet, eyeing his words
so says the parent, with blind instruction

stand mute before your needs
awareness doesn’t amount to much,
nor does anything else.

The water laps the dock
Giving sweet nose, bay redolence flown by the cracking whips of tuffed air,
Listen to the roiling and embrace the soaring perfume
Drumming the song of the deep against the old trees, now pilings
Old trees now legs
That want to kick and splash and enjoy their  ***** neighbor
And run into the depths
But are sadly anchored .
Hear the tern’s silence broken
while the fish break chains of water entrapment
Breaking surface, momentarily flying and shattering back home.
Splash, they all splash.
Splash the tree, splash the silence, splash the sky
Splash is the serenity
Splash is the soothing commotion of the dock.

<>

11:03 Sun Sep 20 2020
2nd Day Rosh Hashana 5781
S.I., N.Y.

when I was twenty years younger, I wrote oft introspectively,
nowadays, today, provoked by the High Holy Day, the New Year,
it is my only filter, lens, and this solitary perspective that this moment affords, permits, demands, commands, insists on,  
prepared by this confession, so that I may better return to the union of my divine spark, unify body and soul, recover my true self,
by acknowledging that I am
not beholden to anyone,
therefore, thereby,
     beholden to everyone

how inconsistently wonderful that additional experience, alive in a time of upheavals, pushes me past the first stanza, where most often, my poems, prayers, go to rest uneasy, incomplete, only to be buried alive in me.

Yet, here I am stuttering, sputtering, words that come unexpectedly!
I have reached a second stanza, with the ending well sighted, nearby. The collective, overlaid wake of each passing boat, finger pointing, a road line for following, to a larger directive, a river emptying into a great ocean, birthplace & graveyard

premature celebration as it’s weeks till I return to this poem-in-progress on a bleak week, the winterized grays have dominated, the freshness of sunlight is just an occasional peekaboo.

The larger directive now suppressed, the pilings of damp brown leaves, multi-message; funeral. mounds of good days gone to hell, the inward perspective has returned me to a deep, dark place.

(Stutter, stutter, each day asseverates solemnly with tinges of rancor, no, no, no, still no answers yet, the second and third stanzas are *******, suns of no man.)

A Winter Ship

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.
Red and orange barges list and blister
Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,
And apparently indestructible.
The sea pulses under a skin of oil.

A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,
Riding the tide of the wind, steady
As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,
The whole flat harbor anchored in
The round of his yellow eye-button.

A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin
Cigar over his rink of fishes.
The prospect is dull as an old etching.
They are unloading three barrels of little *****.
The pier pilings seem about to collapse

And with them that rickety edifice
Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges
In the distance. All around us the water slips
And gossips in its loose vernacular,
Ferrying the smells of cod and tar.

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes —-
A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.
Even our shadows are blue with cold.
We wanted to see the sun come up
And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,

Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,
Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
Encased in a glassy pellicle.
The sun will diminish it soon enough:
Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.

Those saying they gave all gave nothing. 

No one knows she's crying for me. 

With trashhbags spilling from their pockets, the children weep as the men enter their silent temple. 

With potatoes in their hands and bricks on their heads, the women wait for the husbands. 

As priests they exit. All normal patterns again. 

I will separate these teeth from your heart as you scan my newest story. 

I've lost your wonder. Why everything is the same as it was remains a mystery. 

Why these eyes, this heart of mine, why not hers?

Hate simmers. Nothing cooks below. 

One more tin of cream. One more song repressed. A wife with her matchbook terrors. Skin pale, coupons clipped to save heart the extraneous cost. 

Out of the door the lesbians begin their drinking games. 

Smile of mine tell me more meets the eye. Look at the hearts and the pressing of its meats. 

Rearrange the peelings. 

Masculinity transmits over the air. I use this time to soften my bellly. 

The noose catches fire. His tears dousing the freedom. 

First date at theater. Curtain call, begin Love's Final Act. 

The death of you in pieces against rocks. 

Reading for signs of traumatized marrow assuming it is not. 

Warnings of obsession and secrecy as I pollute the sabretooth's mouth. 

My vacation shortened. Flying and seeing the dreams of next time whipping past. 

Coarse hair on my tongue. Trails of you when I speak. 

When will you fade? Love is dead. Let it pass. 

The figure and the ridge shake me. Alone counting how the years have not healed this scar. 

A day. And then a night erased from memory. 

While he speaks I'm told to stop sending letters. 

May the lines become thinner. The hush universal. 

A quiet time. Seen in the sun for the first time. 

Continue reading of deeds snared by Karma. 

Restore yourself for my benefit. 



And so this is the poison she poured into my ears:

 whisper whisper kiss. 


Of the poison what is there holding the vials together?

Machine cut squares knowing the curves of her *******. 

Pressed, brushed to perfection. Where is the warmth beyond the warmth?

Not the glow of nocturnal furnaces. The pressing of skin to the belly of coals. 

Only a mask hiding tears from the public eye. 

It is what you seek. 

Ignite me and marvel alone. 

Explain my scars to me in final excitement. 

On one shoulder I collect the rain. My other brings the spillings. The pool at my feet dries, gathers flies. 

My eyes never closed. My muscles began to shiver and this is all that can be said of last year. 


This year will be dosed heavy with dreams. 


The telephones will soon empty thief wife's of our conversations. 

New dust and **** will cover the bricks our hands feathered over. 

Plates we consumed our dreams on will break, become clean and discarded with the closing of cafe doors. 

You dying and older. Increasing desire. Your basket full of fruit. Your soil toiled in the night. Roots taken, their precious hollows filled. 

Damaged Boardwalk. Mussels cracked, pearl less by design or circumstance. 

Fake both hope and love. Slip away in the pilings of some Ferrari. 

The ash of your candle. Where is it now?

So close to the sea. Yet these stains remain. 

Burn or transgress. Your stones sink in my heart. 

An open letter since birth. 

The barge floats. The operators celebrate the river's damming. 


May you hear my tears in your happy silence.


Just a leaf in the sidewalk. Talks of saplings vanished in the processing. 

Here together in the colder air. 

Forgetful muse, run. Steal their wrestling's warmth. 

The swell beckons. We've yet to share this drink. 

Taste yourself on this raw plate. Fight and move away mediocrity. 


Few lover's sons left. 


Pick your battles from the bag with your boots and that picture of the lion escaping its cage whilst I fell into yours. 

Is there anything else or is this less than what you wanted?

Rude for noting your thinning soles and the leather's scars.

Hard to consider compensation for this blood you've been given. Diseased congealing life force. 

Awake and celebrating with me the people you've left. On this shore, this glimpse of Hell. 

Tossing and turning farther away from refuge. 

Mildewing pamphlets of my red and white memories. All the paintings we're without. 

Hack off my feet and keep me close. I float. Your hauntings with delusions of bliss. 

This is foolish, my pride in the envelope and later the shells. 

Every beacon a reminder to swim farther. Sirens witness my solace.  

Choking back wallows and whispers.

May Neptune weep as I fail in his righteousness. 


Into God's own heart I nestle. Finding rest eternally. 


Young Dracula, stop circling and take me.

I caught a tremendous fish
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
And I let the fish go.
—Elizabeth Bishop

All the people are old people.
Older than me.
Granddad took me fishing
with one of his friends.
They said we’d catch flounder.

They killed the engine
near the bridge pilings.
The lines stayed slack
until a red and white
floater fell below
the bay’s polluted waves.

I thought I felt a flounder
heaving on the hook.
I reeled it up—
a fish,
cylindrical and silver.
Alert, black eyes peered
at me. He floundered
against the skiff’s side
with a barbed hook inside
his young, unscarred mouth.

The old men laughed:
flounder are flat
and brown.
He was small
and nothing special—
not a flounder.
But they didn't let him go.
They ground my catch up
into a pink paste, spotted
with specs of broken bone.
We threw the pieces off the boat
to chum the water.

The boats in the harbor
flirt with the pilings,
their sails have trapped
nothing
and are flaccid,
the gulls scream at the masts,
scream while they lift
their spindly legs
and tiny feet
escaping
the noiselessness.

I sit with the sun
as it bursts
and the cirrus clouds,
like cotton,
are filled with blood
or tears,
or some brutal combination
of both,
as the needles
poke through the house
and the sun
is pushed out.

This bridge is faulty
there is dry-rot  taunting
    the girders
Its spandrels:
all knobby-kneed..
  Its pseudo-elaborate  trusswork,
    as if   designed  
    by a lonely drunk

It's pilings..  questionable
Its deckwork, treacherous.

    Its abutment--
    aw,  **** me..   

    its crumbling.
.  .  

If we cross over  
under the lie of darkness
we won't be so afraid..

     But these structural-flaws,
     when revealed  by the sun
     are so incredibly intriguing.


  Let's take that step
  and see if it holds us.

An intrepid outsider just visiting London,
Smitten, dazzled, by stunning illuminations,
From within a black cab, transporting me,
Not only weaving in present day airy streets,
But through stacked layers of storied history;
Some dark, treacherous and dastardly sinister,
Some light, celebratory and blithely triumphant.

On alighting from the Hackney Carriage,
(use of the word ‘carriage’ emphasising
a vivid stretch of a willing imagination.)
Museum of London beckons, offering pleasure,
Absorbing a tableau of delightful treasure,
Engaging unfettered thoughts and feelings,
Absorbing echoed cries of distant past eras,
Reminders of who we were and who we are,
Plunging archaic depths of vicarious displays,
Delicate fingers pressing upon vibrant pulses,
Within this webbed tomb of sanitised decadence.

In the coolness of encroaching night,
She slumbers, this anchored sprawling behemoth,
Suffering barking dogs, wailing of infants,
Sweet kisses of lust in cardboard-strewn alleys,
Screeches from a gaggle of hen-partying girls,
Screams from urban foxes, cries of a feral cat,
Curtailed by hurried rumble of clattering steel,
Train arteries busy pumping, wheel to wheel,
Ferrying the masses, crammed together classes,
Silent tubes exposing the numbness we feel,
At destinations end our tensions slyly unpeel.

Busy pedestrians skirting human detritus;
Shunning, vagabonds, tramps and thieves,
Amidst intermittent beeps of frantic car horns,
Squealing brakes and hot roaring engines,
She encompasses this amorphous miasma,
Towering skyward, snaking deep underground,
A blaze of coloured light, her own silent sound,
Inhabitants ‘pigged together’ the majority above,
But many, ignored and mistreated, surviving below,
Recognised, yet avoided; pretending, not to know.

Ancient sewers, dead rivers and even deader bones,
As far back as hunter gathers, howling and rutting,
Stout wooden pilings, now sodden river sentinels,
Whilst fire-blackened-pain from early conflagrations,
Blaze through time, ashes of destruction, no deterrent,
Romans plying trades in walled Londinium’, aye,
Emotional fingerprints etched into carved stone,
Resilient through Viking and Saxon times alike,
She survives, strives and thrives, our proud Lady,
Welcoming all, galleons, tea clippers and schooners,
Surging through her carotid artery, such spoils,
For the Big Smoke, tea houses and coffee shops,
Parks and palaces, bridges, tunnels and hovels,
Where now, the bedecked Town Crier? Is all well?

Brash glitz and glamour of threatened Tin Pan Alley,
Cultural elite behind facades of Doric columns,
While Roman foundations bold form, hold firm,
Twisting through the underneath, far beyond forever,
London crunches into the future, unstoppable,
Embracing humanity in a technological fervour,
She adapts, snarls, struts, proud and confident,
Akin to a sentient beast lapping up our needs,
Feeding desires, never judging, only accepting.

My very being saturated within this teeming city,
Of the city, I’m now enmeshed in the infrastructure,
Heart, mind and spirit willingly shackled, captivated by,
Cold agglomeration of steel, glass, concrete and stone,
Wreathed in transient emotions of warm flesh and bone,
Giving and breathing life unto all, even me,
An intrepid outsider just visiting London.

I remember the summer
of 2009. Before the world
turned itself inside out.
Before everything crashed
into everything else.
I remember the quaint
beach house my family
stayed at, with the pink
walls, and the room that
I snuck you into one night
before I left while everyone
else packed and slept for
the drive home. All the cute
shops down the street. The pier
where I would sneak beers
from the cooler of the vendor
selling them while you
distracted him. Bumming
cigarettes off of old men
for the two of us with the
wink of an eye.
You were beautiful.
You were everything
I’ve ever wanted in anyone
since. You kissed with a hint
of vanilla and tobacco and
heineken light that blended
so wonderfully I haven’t
tasted anything since.
You were beautiful.
I was sixteen.
Not much behind you,
but somehow worlds apart.
Now I am old. No longer sixteen.
No longer stealing beer
and cigarettes. I wonder
if you ever went back to
that beach. We were only
there for two weeks. Met
you four days late. Those ten
days were not enough. We would
sit under the pier at midnight,
you leaned against one of
the pilings, cigarette forgotten
in your hand, somehow always
touching mine. Oh, I remember
those two weeks, July, 2009.
Wonder if
you do,
too.

First Boat


first boat off the island @ 5:40 am,
the sun, savvy and knowledgeable
makes sunrise @ 5:14 am for ‘late’ is
not an adjective extant in its stellar lexicon

a safety check, sunlight invades every crack,
pilings vested & secured, ferry engine hums a
warming, morning cranking tune, a sailors
favorite from the global ******’s hymnal

those early morning voyagers, who are exchanging,
one island for another, note their coffee steaming up
coordinates with haze, burning off, all to see the first
waves come to rock them voyagers to “all awaken”

sunlight then slow spreads its envision, from the Heights
over to Mashomack, rousing, disturbing, nudging the
remaining, for there is work, living aplenty, we who stay
to tend to the most appropriately named isle in the world

6/12/21
Silver Beach
Shelter Island, New York

Sometimes, I thought your eyes looked waterlogged,
wet enough to pour floods of biblical
proportion.  I knew you as an ocean;
you slipped through knobby fingers with each pulse.
You growled like waves, and growling, you beat salt
into sunburn with the ferocity
of three thousand hurricanes—no more, no
less.  My palm fronds will always sway for you.

But you never swayed, stayed, or even said
what you meant as your whitecap words washed blind
over coral.  You stung though, full of bone
shards and plastic.  Let’s face it, you’re filthy.
You smell like oil and death. Your rotting weeds
strangle the pilings of flimsy gray docks.

Rage received is like heavy sea
Crashing against the rocks upon which stands a lighthouse,
The waves build up as they reach the shallows,
Steepening and rearing,
Building ire and power until
Smashing over and over
Against the rock and the edifice,
Obliterating any view of the tower
And the rock,

But this lighthouse is indeed built on rock,
With pilings driven deep and secure in
Faith in what lies behind the waves,
Knowlege that the storm will pass,
The sun will shine once more
And even as the salt water and vitriol
Do their worst,
Above it that light still shines out,
A message of love and security,

And these seas which crash into the rock
Were built up by the wind of actions
And words poorly founded,
In the true ocean there will always be
Another storm and another calm,
But rage can find peace now
Because the cause is calm,
The cause is kind,
The cause is gentle

And it holds you gently in my arms

What can a reflection be to itself
Or a falling leaf apart from its mother?
She did not know the answer
She could only scratch her heart until it bled
Like eyes watching lovers that fall but never set

Pilings choking under rising tides
But not high enough to relieve their burden
A wax candle waiting for the torture of the flame
She could only watch knowing its life was short
Soon to join the memories she could never forget

By her rosary she knew somewhere was a blessing
By her cross she knew she was still saved
The stars that had chosen those who would look
Lit the path as she returned to the night sky
As her heart asked if life was only about regret

Today is Sunday and I'm going to the ocean
or maybe not. Definitely not doing the laundry
or maybe I will. Moss and even a small tree
grow in the rotten stubs of the pier pilings.
The city is Seattle and it has a macho airport.

Give me the comfort of a moose knowing its
water supply. The mosquito's acceptance of its position
among a million mosquitoes. The pool of stagnant
water that remains one with the mothering ocean.
I drift on the air, less than a seed, a bacteria.

Or I am human, big ****, big brain containing
universal philosophic affidavit. Pleased by
the churning of my tongue, ****** enlightenment,
devout prayer, gourmet dining. I swear
it is best to be alive and to have loved Mary.

have been drilled and driven pilings around
to strengthen my foundations
pumped out all my feelings
upon this world and have to be fracked for more
to get that last drop of
and give again!

Winter is near, and night drapes quickly over the city, a black satin

sheath to be decorated by the early stars. But the skyline is

different, the glass and stone soldiers that elbow for prominence at

the river’s edge don’t shine bright until the river blackens out of

sight, not until the soft whoosh of the final ripples from the ferry

boats lap up against the pier pilings. No, the skyline sleeps late,

then awakens not for the city, for it stretches and smiles brightly,

before an open-mouthed inhale of cold night air, all show, an

opening number, a roaring, leg-kicking first dance for those who

stare and yearn, who pine in nervous indecision on the far shore,

tantalized, pawing at the ground before, perhaps, bridging the

pitch water to join the city splash, for if one stays put, feet planted

at a distance, beyond the parquet floor, well….

Salt pulpit,
streeted sand,
brass and tar,
bell broken
by the new wave.
Evening splinter
stuck in riprap,
memory hurled
into sharp relief.
Pilings grow,
dead teeth
from rushing
gum of surf.
Night's tide
parks on
blue sand,
dies as foam.
Boardwalk
lights never
seem to waver.