Shorts Page Ten

                                                                                   More accepted Shorts

Frogpond March 2018 

sixty years 

his and her walkers

parked by the bed

almost dawn...      accepted cattails 2018 March

beyond the old shade tree

fractured stars

Frameless Sky  fall2014

a lily
covered in ice
first freeze
caught me unaware you
were already gone

cattails 2015

day moon... 
blue sky siphoned
from black 

sunrise... 
a line of gulls pulling
the tide behind it

sandpipers flee 
north for the summer 
I release
the lines that bind my heart
too closely to you

cattails Spring 2015

cloaked by clouds 
that morphine moon
his essence
slip-slides each night
back to Vietnam

a falling tide 
sucks at the shoreline
they speak
about war days now lost
to the tug of time.

Kernels 2015

passing storm... 
the pine tree throws
its own shower

 

 

cattails 2015 two haibun below

Raging seas have surfed us faster than anticipated towards the bouy that marks the long turn into Atlantic City, New Jersey. Turn too soon and you hit shoals. We had planned our night run to arrive mid morning in order to easily see this crucial buoy. Now, still dark, the buoy sits in a sea of 'experimental buoys', lit up, too, so that it seems we are sailing into a sky of stars rather than this dark, frothing sea.
I quickly grab our hand bearing compass, get a magnetic reading on the fading glimmer of our last identified buoy then read the glow of light on the distant shore that is Atlantic City, scrambling below to chart where the two lines intersect-- our position. Time is of the essence.

Back on the pitching deck i hold the compass towards the course I've drawn between our location and our coveted buoy, pick out one faint light among the others and point.

'Are you sure?' R says.

The only thing I'm really sure of is my pounding heart but I say 'yes'.
Three hours later we drop anchor in Atlantic City harbor and sleep the day through.


casino lights
blink at the sun's belly
groaning halyards



=============





We are in the North Carolina waterway now, slowly moving south from the Chesapeake Bay, as fall appears in the tall trees alongside us. Albert and Suzanne motor-sail in front of us in the only other boat we've seen as small as ours since we left Boston. The water is calm so Albert plays his fiddle, foot guiding the tiller, hair brushing his shoulders, while I wash breakfast dishes in a bucket in our cockpit.

A huge power boat races up, then thrusts into reverse to stop beside us. The passengers rush to our side, cameras clicking, until they roar away again, leaving our boats rocking. I wonder whose photo albums we'll be in, how many viewers will later say, 'how quaint'.

a log floats
beneath the jet's contrails...
somewhere a song

 

 

 

 

 

 

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