Living in a Van on Shelter Island

Each breeze seeks and sets halyards slapping masts
on squat boats bound and naked on the bay.
This sound is wind chimes, bone strikes savage bone,
or skeletal soldiers born of dragon's teeth,
deathly crazed, they clatter into battle,
slice flesh again, then fall themselves like sticks.
The din comes and goes with footsteps, night blows,
but I am safe here; I cannot be touched.
My radio soothes me with amplitude modulation.
With an ear on the speaker, I listen:
Herbert W. Armstrong, doctor this or that.
It speaks to me on Shelter Island.

I smell eucalyptus when I wake, coffee at Red Sails,
cigarettes, ten hours of polyurethane at 50 psi.
Enter me, burn my lungs, make me cough and spit
proudly while cannon rounds silence the bay.
A marlin hangs head down, marking a scale,
shining blue-black in the sun, that meaningless gaze
photographed from every hunching angle.
Red runs from the gills, down the long spear,
trailing little roses to the sea: Not Captured.
It speaks to me on Shelter Island.


(Arkansas Magazine, July 29, 1984; Poems by Poets Roundtable of Arkansas, 1985)