Bayman's Verses
for Ron
At the cusp of Spring,
when the South Wind
warms the cold bay,
Fog paints the world gray.
The ferries low to each other
And I look over my shoulder
for Ron's skiff
which leaves no wake anymore in the deep channel.
He would butt his boat to mine,
lash on,
count oysters and,
in a voice that foghorns envied,
that silenced gulls,
would recount his day's travail
deep in the creeks
forking clams.
Summers he tonged
the bottom, sang operas,
declaimed verse to a greek chorus of king fishers,
saw the mythic in the minutia of grass shrimp,
harked the heroism of fish hawks
while bull raking five bushels.
He was a bayman
who drank every night and worked out
the bad juice by noon,
passed on the wisdom
of where oysters set,
winked and hummed,
La donna mobile
before untying, starting his 9 horse and
drifting home, with the ebb tide, into the deep channel.
The North Wind shushes his children
the waves
until they are frozen still,
silent,
reflecting a smooth moon.
Unlike the South wind, a calvary charge,
a hurricane,
the North Wind wins by determination.
Freezing the bay, gripping the shore and
Plucking out man-made pilings like puny splinters in her paws.
Life hibernates
waiting for its chance.
We depend on Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year to get us through,
to bare our breasts to the dragons.
We read books and write letters. We paint the hall.
We armor against the North Wind, huddle, shovel, wrap our
legs around each other. Build fires in our souls.
Plan the next year. Pay taxes. Seduce ourselves all over again.
The North Wind thickens the shells.
carves the snow drifts,
scours the beach,
sculpts the shore;
Ice its teeth, its instruments.
It whistles at the ghosts. It shoots stars.
The bayman pulls his boat out, gives up, talks Havana and Hawaii
but knows he won't leave his hearth. He pickaxes the ice,
jagged crags of white against an ultra blue bay,
To look at his pearls, his animals,
to see them. Touch them and sort them.
The bay has turned from slush to ice
hard enough for a man to walk, maybe
All the beautiful birds,
the kingfisher, the heron, and the ospreys
have gone to Havana.
Only the garbage eating gull is left
The old fishermen love the gull,
circling above the schools.
The bayman will feed the hungry gull on his culling deck
Blue points, cherry stones, green crabs and eels,
Because the gull will never leave him,
even in a blizzard
its raucous caw a mazurka
The boat is pulled out, the cages sunk, the bilge drained.
The gull comes to the bayman's empty dock
looking for spare change, leaving footprints in the ice.
Low tide at dawn -
The bayman tromps to his secret spot
through oak and sassafras saplings;
He cracks the crust of the ice
revealing a trove of mussels
veiled by seaweed
the hay grass withered.
Like serrated teeth they protrude
from the insulating mud.
With bare hands the bayman
picks the mussels, a motion
older than Time, before books, between
fire and basket weaving.
In an hour, before the tide seeps through the ice
while the sun casts a rose glow over the frozen creek,
He gathers a bushel, calls the
dog back from the edge of the ice pack,
Tells the kids to wash them in the creek
and tag them for a bistro in the City.
In yellow waterproof overalls,
Hooded sweater,
Blue shucking gloves cold from last night's air,
The Bayman stands at his tiller
Four stroke 18 horse engine putt-putting
Out of the Creek,
Its grasses gone to seed, brown and drying -
October cooling the air faster than the bay.
He's out to his cages,
a scheme of their anchors, trawls and rigs
drawn carfully on an unused scrap of plastic
With an indelible pen
like God's list of sins.
He husbands his seashells,
Sorts the big from the small, the fast growers
from those that simply are doomed,
Their own brothers, all two million from
the same Adam of Oysters.
The spare mechanical advantage of a winch
lifts one weeping cage after another
As the black sky gives way to the Prenumbra,
Then the Big Bang
of Sunrise
as golden as the Apple, like Eve's hair brushed before lovemaking,
Warms his yellow slicker,
Stirs a breeze against his ruddied face, mustache,
Hair growing out of his ears.
He counts his big ones and
Multiplies that number
by today's price.
There's a big demand in LA
for Blue Points.
Tethered to a stake,
Her bow snug in the spartina
The rowboat, angelic, reflects herself in the creek,
Her planks steamed and bent,
caulked, sanded and painted every Spring,
for a new season.
In minutes she spans the cosmos
Where the moon sweeps,
Flood and Ebb,
Where the celestial orbs
Displace time and place in the
Fluid womb of the Bay,
Where Mars mounts her transom every night red
like bottom paint
And Poseidon nuzzles her freeboard
with schools of bluefish.
The simple primitive motion of oars in water
Needs no explanation
Nor does the nubile frame
sturdy and firm to the touch like hips
conjur any thought but the
moan and murmur and lapping of
Contentment at the
Perfect fulfillment of function.
Bouyant with hope and knowledge
that her woods and oakem caulks
will never sink,
That her bow will split the salted marshes flanked by
sea oats, sea heathers, spartinas and feathers
of beach grass seeding in late August,
That her gunwales will crest the pearled bays
She reads the stars
Drifts with the moon
Warms to the sun.
A cage winched out of the water,
draped with seaweed like hag hair
Will pull downwind, its tether turning the boat stern to the wind.
The bayman grabs the cage and steadies his feet against the gunwales,
achieving a perfect balance between the sea and the sky,
perpendicular to the pull of gravity.
Slowly, the boat moves under the cage; and,
one hand on the cage, two feet walking down the gunwale,
his back still a perfect plane of horizontal existence
pulling against the wind and the boat,
flat out like in a coffin,
only his feet touching the gunwales, his hands clawing the cage
suspended in the liquid womb of spawn,
he winches down the cage onto the
culling platform.
At each high tide, the thaw undermines the ice.
The bayman knows this is not the Spring, but
a barker enticing men to the sea.
The bayman walks atop the ice pack
each nor'earster driving the rain
against the frozen surface:
will it crack under the bow, or
grab and hold his boat?
Should he wait another week before
dipping into his treasure chest of shells,
should he go
to weather.com
measure the seasons by the arthritic elbow,
apply bottom paint, don the insulated armor
Or wait another week or two
for the world to crack open, burn more wood
warm his feet under the stove, talk to
his dog about next year's crop?