Like Trees

Napowrimo Day Three. In bed at 11:30. Shit! No poem today!  Half hour later, this.

Like Trees

the water changes daily–

gray, green, blue, white,

black, glassy, ripples, rollers,

whitecaps, mountains. Fish

jump everywhere you look one day.

The next is blank, featureless ocean.

I remember walking a park on the hill

in Louisville after a tornado:  hardwoods

snapped like children’s toys, six-ton Pick Up

Stix, strewn on top of one another. Hours

before, we walked the trail for the hundredth,

two-hundredth time. After the storm, we got

lost in the jumble. the water is like that. easy
to lose yourself. never the same. never anchored.

Here we Go...Day One.

A Poem a Day for June. Number one:

Simple Mathematics

A storm is whistling in:

the bottoms of scudding clouds

obscured by the lighter gray

of diagonal rain.

If this geometry were at the coast

or on more protracted water,

the wind would gauge whitecaps

and reckon waves of substance

on a heaving waterscape,

but in these protected inlets

and coves, only small ripples

bisect the surface with the gusts –

no waves to speak of at all.

A black tug pushing a mouth

of white froth has left port,

the wind at its stern.

A patch of light spreads across

the darker, wind-troubled bay

as it moves away: calm water extends

in a widening triangle

that marks the channel –

a compass between the buoys.