Recess
That clamouring hour
in the yard where the standpipe
rose out of cement
is glued in a cavity
behind my eyes
even now.
When, between the cow pasture
on the east side
and the linked fence to the west,
all meaning and order was contained:
We would gallop the perimeter,
as pintos, flipping up our pine tails
unbridled and wild, loud whinnies
making us real, pawing dust
with hooves of
cloth sneakers
out beyond the slide
trying to escape
that corral of knowing
the bell would ring,
when the teacher with
the permanent boil on her chin
would come out and take
our tails.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Bass Waves
My father taught me to cast
a fishing line,
unhook a silver scup,
keep a good lure
and make it last
out there in the harbor,
at the edge of a dock.
He’d say waves out by Eustis Rock
at sunset meant the bass were in:
“bass waves” he’d say, mirth in his eye,
handing me the spyglass
as if it would seal my faith.
I was thirty before I learned
there was no such thing,
just old wakes
from boats gone by.
In August, the pogies came,
chased in by the bigger blues,
sudden fish in the channel.
He’d chew the soft side of his cheek,
determined and patient
as he took a rod out to the dock
and cast that clear rubber minnow
again and again.
Later, he’d play the uke and spoons
and sing a low harmony
when my brother came
and no one really knew
how hard my mother worked
to ration his whiskey down
in that big shingle-house
on a grassy bluff
lit like a ship
on a late summer night,
full like a vault of memory:
Of fish, in a sautee, and glads in a jug,
of cribbage and cards and very good gin
in the usual din of guests
from all over the world.
No one knew how hard he tried
there
at the edge of a world
where the bass waves came in
just wetting the red-legged dock.
• Mira Coleman writes from Western Maine, was first published in 1975 in Flowering After Frost, An Anthology of Contemporary New England Poets (Branden, Boston). She is a retired Massachusetts probation officer. Bass Waves was first published in the February 2008 issue of the Daily Bulldog LLC (Farmington, Maine).
