More on: sailing

This is where I live. This is the house in which I, we, once—this is the small square window that works as a porthole to make the pantry a boat, the leaves water, the lawn chair a skiff. Some late shadows are rowers in breeze. Some toys are anchors. The phrase all this fall fills…

On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else could we do? We…

(1994) FROM THE BREAKFAST BUFFET, Aurora slipped an apple and a banana into the pockets of her apron before opening the doors of the Seneca Hotel café. She looked around for the two skinny, towheaded schoolboys who often sidled up to accept her secret handouts. She never gave them donuts or sugary drinks, but always…

It is hard to be misunderstood. And how many of us get vindication after a century or so? I mistook the little bloodsucker for a wad of gauze as it whirled from the sailor’s spliced thumb. It became an iridescent helix, a liquid amber’s leaf dangling through a day-long spring and fall and spring, Have…

I am much comforted by ordinary things by the whalebone covers of my missal sadly worn and warmer to my hand than amber or by the cry of gulls greedy as pagans for the bread we throw on seas so troubled and so terrible I am amazed God made them except I stand upon a…