CHANNELS RUN DEEPER
Inside the house, pine knots stare back;a scruffy sapling still brushes the windows.
The kitchen serves only its inventory:
a huge blue pot, full of the memory of crabs
kicking with mustard, flat beer, and Old Bay,
unused plates that held deviled eggs and tomatoes,
a silver kettle no longer steaming with bath water.
The porch creaks differently, now
with older, heavier foot steps.
The feather lightness and lowered perspective
of my childhood still run end to end
along my boundless recollection.
Men talked louder from the bay
in the days when fishermen's voices
skittered across a slate-gray calm,
the morning low-tide holding still
for their sea-brave swagger and trade.
Grandma found in my sea-watching soul
a kindred to her own, open arms to the bay,
where she stood like a statue remarking
how time and erosion returns us all to the sea.
Redemption may reclaim her from clay,
from this house of relics and rotten chairs,
flotsam floating, silt slipping to the bottom.
The captain's bell brought us to dinner,
its bright ring that slapped back from the breakfront,
rounded up clean hands in time for grace,
thankful that all was carefully being watched
until it was time to be called in from the shore.
The disappearance of greatness and gentleness
is taking eons to wash out from us in trenches.
Channels run deeper than blue poles on the horizon
indicate as they vaporize our tangible grasp.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2010
