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| Greenville, New Hampshire |
Coming Home After Getting Clean
for Becky Bulsa
… to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore....
Think of making your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! To have
the waves, like a pack of hungry wolves, eying you always,
night and day, and from time to time making a spring at you,
almost sure to have you at last.
Henry David Thoreau
Cape Cod
On Saturday... go to her… her mother...it’s the right thing
to do… the final funeral of a girl who just, was it two?
a few years ago sat at a classroom table the same tables I have
there now, who wrote poems and read Thoreau and swore
(but always justified) and beat her fist
against the insides of ribs and cages of the world wanting
out but not really that but away some way
to make that dorry of her orphanage take
on some buoyancy in a port she’d never been out
of but always had in her head because listen there’s
something to be said for the novitiate and getting
out into the middle of sewer and then past it all on your own
terms and then change boats and set a course direct
wheel to rudder even having blown blind into the shoals
and what luck someone doing their job lit the lamp rubbed
the smoke from the Fresnel time after time. But not this time.
This time last I think you drowned during a change in shifts. I think
yes this must’ve been what happened you’d gone
to the island to get clean and sober and be-
ieved the way back was clear and you knew the routine
and looking over that gunwale and all the way
home your right hand gripped on the wheel then slipped
and your fingertips dropped back to the kelp and oarweed
they must’ve what did you see, please, to make you
need that keeper again but shifts were changing
and even though the lights were lit the shoals rose
unseeable to you and broke you open and broke your boat
open open
