In the Woods Hole Harbor - Poem

Commonweal, March 8, 2002 by Catherine Staples

   You can't see them from Shuckers', or even
   the Captain Kidd, not for the sea of masts
   rocking at anchor, Lasers and Snipes needling in
   on changeable wind. You have to cross
   the drawbridge where the whole road lifts
   to allow the passing of a single sail, wander
   downhill past missing pickets and gray shingled
   disrepair to the harbor's backdoor. There
   in the bilge and muck, eight to ten
   spent rowboats and a tipped bluewhale of a dory--
   bleached, peeling, someone else's summers
   disappearing in weeds. No more remarkable
   than a neighbor's sheets idling in wind.

   But once, just there, in the oil trap by the dory's
   stern, two boys vied for turns at the tiller. Their sister
   trailed a branch in the rilled wake, felt the light thrum
   of resistance. Father talked reaches, runs, heading high
   and low--then with one deft tug, reeled her in
   snug to the rocking red buoy. Their mother looked
   leeward--blue kerchief bellying wind
   like a tight jib--she daydreamed and napped
   behind her dark glasses. Channel markers tossed,
   rang their deep water tidings. And the sister looked up
   in time to see an island becoming itself--sandy spit
   and lighthouse, slender white
   lighthouse with a catwalk above
   and someone there--a man, no--a boy
   on the jetty, centerboard humming, a lone skate
   rising out from the sand and little more
   than an arm's length away--a dark-eyed boy--
   sleek as a seal with seaweed and water, hair spun loose
   in an arc of gleaming flicks, the unruined wild
   of his eyes--still as a hare in the lamp of her gaze.