By James Lowell
for Grant Gelette
Here on Pope’s Island,
the Foxy Lady’s
down-at-heel strip joint,
fronts Niemiec’s shipyard’s
old hulls on the hard,
rusting in time’s tide
antifoul bottoms
sulking, reflecting
on the sea dancer
idling below them.
In her breeze ruffled
slip, silt rivulets
snake from Weepecket,
through the hurricane
barrier into
New Bedford’s fabled
fleet’s harbor as gusts
guttering rattle
the hermit bridge grate,
as this fish raiser
securely refuels.
Shapely and proud-bowed,
unbowed outriggers
dance in the seamount
wake of wave hammered
inbound and outbound
dredgers and draggers.
Her eye-catching chines,
sea-knifing deadrise
still lure deckhands
and greenhorns catching
only each other
in waxed reflection.
Like she is straining
on her taut dock lines,
bull in the chute’s pen
her engines snorting,
ride-angling to buck
past Quicks Hole’s ocean.
Her gunwale shudders
as if a Bluefin
chasing skirt teasers’
green machine glitter,
head jetting smoke trails,
cedar sea strikers,
or piano wires
lit with plucked Makos
finned from her chum slick’s
tail-blasted transom,
head shaking, ravaged
down to the unbent
blood dripping aught hooks.
At dock, impatient,
her lines shark singing,
whining, divining
in melon scented
canyon deep tremors
off jealous shrimp boats
airing fish rumors,
in well-schooled holders
rods swivel seaward.
Against shore cleat’s hold,
her bilge pumps run dry,
her fuel tanks topped up,
her deck swabbed pristine,
soon beyond longing
she’ll rise to wave strut
and make her living.
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.
