We joked the antique dealers on Menemsha
bought new oars in October for no more
than twenty dollars, let them weather
on the beach all winter to ply the waters
of their marked up summer trade.
Their wind swept shack
bespoke the faux authentic
where antiques go to collect themselves
like winter buoys drawn to summer tide lines,
artifacts cut off from their life’s creel.
One fallen, silvered shingle oozing tar
could be there all summer if the sales
are slow or if the caretakers have gone
down the road that earns them a short stay
from having to foreclose upon their own
way of making, as a farmer does,
a living from one season all year long.
Between the high end dealers of past lives
and those who keep the current in repair,
all live the life they came to leave behind.
Jim Lowell is a winter mainlander and summer Cuttyhunk poet whose works have appeared in The Canadian Review of Literature, English, The Caribbean Writer and elsewhere.