Conversations on The Fish Pier After the Hurricane Three gulls square up to sunrise jawing to one another, plumped against the chill. He knocks his cold pipe out against a propped-up boot, a man of salt and smoke, mackerel scales glittering like sequins along his sleeves -- Cinderella gone back to ashes. King tide's imperial arm swept docks off footings, like pallets sledged to sticks. Two rows of snapped pilings now, brown, broken teeth in the harbor's underbite. A force eleven storm scuttled skiffs in marinas and lurched fish-houses over, but as the fisherman sees it: decades, we take from the sea; one day the sea takes back, fair in the exchange but still a damned pain, and months to put right. A stooped lobsterman trudges the beach scooped to stones for salvageable traps, his livelihood's entrails eaten away by shifts of climate and regulation -- bugs migrating north to Canada. Hard tellin' how much time to rebuild. Or should he hang it up, retire to a Key West double-wide, golf, and a Boston Whaler? Nowhere's immune to trouble. Weather comes for us all, Boothbay, Duluth, or Miami. We carry our worry with us. When we're without it, we make it, swim in it like pollack. Without it we'd gasp, give up. Northern sea folk, we rise after challenges, snap at them like flies or gobies from the foam, relish gale in our face. We're born to pine, kin, and stone. Home's harsh tang to us never sours in the mouth.
Ferrying No need of oars, the faint current shifts our canoe through high islands of marsh-grass. All we see: the roots, their peaty tangle, and sky, down chartless channels. We lean back and trust that we will know the sea when we see it. As with all storytellers, a fallow takes us tidally. We can't help but look back in rumination while Lot and Orpheus go charging on without a backward glance toward the shore where, their congress of arms subsided in a sigh, the unhelmed heroes wait, anguished, to depart. We women drift, surrendering, in the elemental slosh and hum surrounding us, as at home in shadows as in light. Two mystifying worlds touch, spark, and lose touch, as with empty vessel the ancient ferryman comes dripping out of the dark.
Where From and Whither? It's everything we want to ask a stranger passing when we ourselves are lost and passing, but cannot ask where we are together. Are we merely taking notes to be totted at last in catalogs of dismissal? Found in countries we unmap? Described in lines we redraw then scumble? So, tell me one true thing from your scuffed heart, from its healed seam. Lay your fingers on my wrist while you relate your myth of origins snugged smooth as sheets, all you have brought to point to, to point out like Verrazzano, leaning hip to the rail, naming unmet landmarks: the cape of avarice, point speculation. This is the blistered road of pilgrims. Only the mazed walk here humbly enough, not knowing the way, while the old land hums under our soles its holy music. Lost, maybe we too become holy, people of nothing but silt and humus, a bit more spindrift in history whited-out around us in a pass of mountained snow. Keep calling out, stranger. I need your voice to be nearby. I'm sure I will never be wholly known to myself without you.
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Photography Credit: Jason Rice (detail)
Jennifer M Phillips is a bi-national poet, a retired Episcopal Priest and AIDS Chaplain, gardener, grower of Bonsai, and has been writing and publishing poetry and prose since age seven and authored two books of prayers. Her work has won several awards, was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Prize, and has two poems currently nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize 2024, and has had work published in over ninety journals. Her two chapbooks are Sitting Safe in the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press 2022).
